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New Hampshire Biography 
and Autobiography 



BY 

F. B. SANBORN 

OF 

CONCORD IN MASSACHUSETTS 
(1S31 to 1860) 



PRIVATELY PRINTED 

CONCORD, NEW HAMPSHIRE 

JULY, 1905 









AlitiK ' 

(Pefion) 



PREFACE. 



The following pages, written at the suggestion of my friend, Henry B. 
Colby, editor of the Granite Monthly, may sometime be continued, as time is 
found for those reminiscences which I have often been urged to write. But 
I close them here for the present, having put on record those facts and 
impressions which depend on the memories of youth rather than on the writ- 
ten records that in my case have accumulated during threescore years, and 
require more leisure than I can now command for their compilation and 
verification. 

The mode of printing adopted, though inconvenient in some respects, has 
enabled me to insert for preservation many scenes and portraits that might 
otherwise be lost. This form of partial publication may be followed here- 
after so as to include other illustrations not properly belonging to these chap- 
ters, or which were not available at the time of their first printing. 

The "Sanborn Genealogy," mentioned on page 26, is published by my 
son, Victor Channing Sanborn, at Kenilworth, Illinois, who is now pre- 
paring a genealogy of the Leavitts and Blands. 

Concord, Massachusetts, 
July 4, 1905. 



CONTENTS. 



Chapter I. Childhoood ... ... Pages 

CHAPTER EI. Hereditary Influences . ... 21-31 

Chapter [II. Youthful lyove, Marriage ... $2 53 

Chapter IV. John Brown and His Friends 51 ; s 



ERRATA 



On page i'>, in the sonnet, first line, read: " Being absent, yet thou art 
not all withdrawn." 

< )n - ;, line 13, from top of lust column, read : " I can be truer with 

Prank, he judging," etc. 

On page ) s , end of verses, read "trait" for "tract- " 

On pa Brown's letter, [857, should be i< 



ILLUSTRATIONS. 



Birthplace of the Sanborns, Hampton Falls 

Portrait of F. B. Sanborn, 1904 

Old House of Benjamin Sanborn, Munt Hill 

Old Meeting-house, Hampton Falls 

Interior of the Same .... 

Oldest House in Hampton Falls (first Cram house) 

Portrait of Miss Sanborn, set. 40 . 

Residence of Squire Tom Leavitt . 

Portraits of T. Leavitt and His Wife (1808) . 

Neighborhood of the Meeting-house and Parsonage, 1904 

Headstone of President Langdon, Hampton Falls 

Unitarian Church, Hampton Falls (built 1839) 

Portrait of Charles Henry Sanborn, aet. 25 

Portrait of F. B. Sanborn, aet. 17 (1849) 

Portrait of Senator Norris (about 1854) . 

Portrait of Thomas Leavitt, Esquire, set. 75 

Portrait of F. B. Sanborn, set. 21 (1853) 

Portrait of Ariana Walker, set. 18 (1847) 

Portrait of F. B. Sanborn in Harvard College 

Exeter Main Street in 1850 .... 

Portrait of Consul-General George Walker, aet. 61 

Peterborough Main Street in 1854 . 

The " Little Wood " on Grove Street, Peterborou 

Residence of Ariana Walker, Grove Street 

Ravine and Cascade, Peterborough 

Autograph of Miss Walker . 

River Bank behind Miss Putnam's Cottage 

Autograph of Judge Keyes, 1856 . 

Portrait of John Brown, set. 57 (beardless) 

Autograph of John Brown, 1857 

Autograph Letter of Brown in Prison (1859) 

Portrait of John Brown (bearded), 1859 

Portrait of Chief-Justice Shaw (W. M. Hunt, 1858) 

Portrait of F. B. Sanborn, aet. 25 (1857) 

Portrait and Autograph of Vice-President Wilson 

Portrait of Captain Avis, Virginian, Jailer of Brown 

Portrait of General Frank Barlow, aet. 28 



Frontispiece. 



Pasre 



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9 

10 
1 1 
12 

15 
16 

19 
20 
22 
26 

3i 
36 
37 
44 
45 
48 
49 
50 
5i 
5i 
52 
56 
57 
58 

65 
67 

72 
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76 

77 




F. B. Sanborn (I 904). 



HISTORY AND POETRY FROM THE LIFE OF F. B. SANBORN 
OF CONCORD, MASSACHUSETTS. 



CHAPTER I. — CHILDHOOD. 

At the request of the editor of the 
Granite Monthly, who desires to 
preserve and publish in this maga- 
zine all that relates to the colony and 
state where we were born, I begin 
these recollections of a long life, in 
which will be mingled many a strand 
from earlier times than ours, and 
many another life which has crossed 
mine, or flowed beside it to that wide 
ocean of Eternity, towards which 
every human existence tends, in its 
short course through this inscrutable 
world. We are sent into it without 
our will, and we stay here a longer or 



shorter time, with no consent of our 
own, for the most part ; and the influ- 
ence of our small contribution of vital- 
ity and activity, to the infinitude of 
life around us, we can neither com- 
pute nor avoid in the final reckoning 
of human accountability. I can at 
least say that mine has never been 
consciously directed, save in the sal- 
lies of youth, towards aught but the 
good of others, as I then understood 
it ; though it may well be that what I 
thought for their best was in its effect 
far otherwise. 

My vitality, but, I hope, not my 
infant accountability, began in a brisk 
winter day, December 15, 1831, in 



FRANK A". SAXHORN. 




The Old B. Sanborn House. (In Front of Munt Hill ) 



the southwest lower room of the old 
house, built in 1743, which is repre- 
sented in the view of it here given. 
My mother, Lydia Leavitt by her 
maiden name, was then approaching 
thirty-two, having been born at her 
father's house, under the four elms, 
(Thomas Leavitt's) in March, 1800, 
coincident with the new century, and 
married at the age of twenty. My 
father, Aaron Sanborn, was then 
thirty-nine (born November 26, 1 793); 
and I was the fourth of his children 
who survived an infant, his first- 
born, dying in i820-'2i. His oldest 
son, my eldest living brother, to 
whom I was much indebted for my 
early education, Charles Henry San- 
born, became a physician after many 
experiences and some adventures, and 
practised for more than forty years in 
the old township of Hampton, which 
was founded in [638 by our earliest 
American ancestor, Reverend Stephen 
Bachiler, an Oxford graduate of 
[586, and the latest of our immediate 
line to receive a university degree, 
until 1855 and [856, when Charles 
and I took our Harvard diplomas of 
A. B. and M. I)., 270 years later 
than our clerical forefather. In 1 -'.7 
our youngest brother, Joseph Leavitt 



Sanborn (born in October, 1843 ) , took 
his Harvard degree. In his educa- 
tion Dr. Charles and I co-operated, 
and also his two sisters and elder 
brother, Lewis Thomas Sanborn (born 
October 1 1, 1834 ; died June 26, 1904), 
under whose particular care he was 
after my leaving New Hampshire in 
iS54-'55- These sisters were Sarah 
Elizabeth (born May 23, 1823; died 
at Hampton Falls, Feb. 25, 1903) and 
Helen Maria (born March 17, 1S30, 
and still living in our old home). 
Our ancestors, with the exception of 
Mr. Bachiler and his eldest grand- 
son of the Sanborn line, John, were 
all born in the first broad township of 
Hampton, including what are now 
that town and Hampton Falls, North 
Hampton, Seabrook, .Southampton, 
and a good part of Kensington. Most 
of them, excepting the second John 
Sanborn and his brother Joseph (of 
the Sanborn line) were born on the 
farm of which our old house was near 
the center, and the Benjamin Sin- 
born house (represented above) was 
at the western limit. Another San- 
born house stood not far from the 
barn of Dr. .Sanborn's place, and was 
long the residence of Deacon Benja- 
min, one of the first of many Hamp- 



FRANK B. SANBORN. 



ton Falls deacons ; while a still older 
house, most likely of hewn logs, 
stood near the " Pepperidge Bush," 
which was a landmark for centuries, 
half way down the hill to the north- 
west, on the old Exeter road. 

The original Sanborn farm, taken 
up, as I suppose, before 1680, ad- 
joined the farm of Nathaniel Bachel- 
der, a grandson of Parson Stephen, 
now occupied (in part) by my cousin, 
Warren Brown, the historian of the 
parish and town of Hampton Falls. 
It was much more extensive than that 
lately left by my brother, Lewis, and 
seems to have reached from the cor- 
ner where the " Old Mill Road " comes 
out upon the ' ' Back Road ' ' to Hamp- 
ton, westward about 220 rods, to the 
Indian hill behind the Benjamin San- 
born house, on which, traditionally, 
was the wigwam of an Indian — 
always known as ' ' Munt Hill, ' ' mean- 
ing "Mound Hill," as I fancy. 
This neighborhood center of San- 
borns, Bachelders, and Prescotts 



was originally a blockhouse fort 
against Indian assault, then a school- 
house, and finally the meeting-house 
of 1768, here represented. One by one 
the families removed, and others came 
in (always excepting the Sauborns and 
a branch of the Bachelders), so that, 
at my birth, the neighborhood was 
made up of Sanborns in two houses, 
the Browns in two, the Lanes (a con- 
nection of the Sanborns by the mar- 
riage of Deacon Lane to my grand- 
father's aunt, Mary Sanborn), and the 
Perkinses, Wellses, and Healeys, who 
had come upon the lands of Deacon 
Sanborn, and of the Greens and Pres- 
cotts and Cliffords gone elsewhere. 
Temporarily the parsonage was empty 
of a minister (Parson Abbot having 
gone upon his farm at Windham) 
and my uncle, Joseph, with his wife 
and two children were there, tenants 
of the parish. A few years after my 
birth they removed to what is now 
the oldest house in town — an ancient 
Cram homestead — my uncle's wife 




The Old Meeting-house. 



FRANK /-'. SANBORN 




of the Old Meeting-house. 



being Betsey Cram, a sister of Porter 
and Joseph Cram, who were an im- 
portant influence in my boyhood and 
youth, as will be seen. Of this house 
the artist presents a view in connec- 
tion with the story of my first esca- 
pade. In my native hamlet I was one 
of some twenty children-six vSanhorns, 
one Sanborn-Stevens, adopted by my 
grandfather; six Healeys, cousins of 
Mrs. Dallj three Browns, two Lanes, 
two Wellses, and one Perkins -the 
other Browns and Perkinses having 
grown up and gone into the world to 
make their way. At present there 

but four children where the twen- 
ty-one of 1833 gamboled and went to 
school at the red or the brick school- 
hon.se. My systematic instruction 

mi in the red house, on the ridge 
leading to my Grandfather Leavitt's 
hill and meadow farm, and half way 
between his house and my father's. 

My sisters took me there before 1 was 



four, and at the age of four and a half 
f was the pupil of dear'Mary Law- 
rence, who gave me my first reward 
of merit, and bestowed on me her 
sweet smile, which I still remember. 
She was the daughter of Dr. Law- 
rence of Hampton, and taught only 
in summers — the winter schools, fre- 
quented by the big boys, requiring 
the muscles of a schoolmaster, who 
sometimes wielded the rod with manly 
vigor. I was soon transferred to the 
brick schoolhouseon the 1 '.\eter road, 
and there continued my education, 
summer and winter, till at the age of 
eleven 1 had begun algebra, and 
was learning a little Latin from my 
brother Charles, who read C;csar, 
Virgil, ami Cicero at the age of 
twenty, self-instructed, so far as I 
know. 

but I have a few recollections 
earlier than even my alphabetical 
school years, indeed, 1 must have 



FRANK B. SANBORN. 



had the alphabet wheii I went to 
Mary Lawrence ; for I then read in 
words of two or three syllables, and 
could understand the pictured fables in 
the spelling-book that had superseded 
Webster's. His " rude boy " steal- 
ing apples still survived in the newer 
book, and could be seen in the coarser 
printed Webster, carefully preserved 
among other old schoolbooks in the 
garret. Of this garret I have early 
souvenirs ; but one of my earliest 
recollections is of another garret, with 
very steep stairs, up which my short 
legs, at three years old, could hardly 
mount. I remember myself in a 
short plaid gown, toiling up this 
mountain pathway, along with another 
child (Arthur Godfrey, perhaps), and 
not till many years after did I recog- 
nize this same stairway in the old 
Benjamin Sanborn house, then owned 
by Cousin Nancy, in which my Aunt 
Dorothy, soon to be mentioned, was 
brought up by her grandmother as a 
companion to her younger cousin, 
early left an orphan. This incident I 
place in 1835 ; but before that I was 
the hero of another adventure, of 
which my mother told me, for I can- 
not recall it. In 1834, when I was a 
little beyond two years and a half, if so 
much, our house was struck by light- 
ning, and the bolt ran down the big 
chimney, and diverted itself a little 
in the ' ' back chamber, ' ' where I was 
playing alone, near the chimney. My 
sister ran up to see what had hap- 
pened to me, but I was found placidly 
playing with a stick, seated on the 
floor, and declaring that the great 
noise had been made by my pounding 
on the floor with my stick. I believed 
myself already capable of making 
some stir in the world. 

My father was one of five children 



by the two marriages of my Grand- 
father Sanborn with two cousins 
named Blake. By the first was born 
one daughter, Dolly (shortened from 
Dorothy), who never married ; by 
the second, two sons and two daugh- 
ters, of whom only the younger 
daughter, Sally, married. The two 
brothers, Joseph, named for the 
builder of the house, and Aaron (a new 
name in the family), had been diligent 
pupils in the district school, and re- 
ceived prizes for their skill in mathe- 
matics, — small American editions of 
"Pope's Essay on Man," to which 
his Universal Prayer was annexed. 
These, together with the "ciphering 
books" that had won the prize, re- 
mained in an old chest in the west 
garret, which contained a medley of 
ancient literature. Upon these my 
thirst for reading exercised itself for 
half a dozen years, — almanacs and 
school-books, old copies of the New 
Hampshire Patriot of Isaac Hill, and 
more recent copies of the first Uni- 
versalist newspaper in Boston, Thomas 
Whittemore's Trumpet. 

But there was more solid food in a 
" Social Library " founded by Parson 
Abbot, who had succeeded Dr. Lang- 
don as the town minister when my 
father was five years old, and induced 
his parishioners to take shares in it. 
Ordinarily it was kept in the parson- 
age, across the green from my grand- 
father's house, where now stands the 
house, about the same size, of my 
late brother Lewis. Before I was 
eight years old I began to read those 
books, particularly " Mavor's Voy- 
ages" and "Plutarch's Lives," the 
latter in Langhorne's version, with 
quotations from Homer given in the 
words of Pope, and with other poetic 
passages (in the footnotes) from Dr. 



FRANK />'. SANBORN. 




The Old Cram House 



Johnson anil his contemporaries. For 
fiction we had the " Popular Tales" 
of Miss I'.dgeworth and the " Moral 
Tales" of Hannah More; while ser- 
mons and biographies, Goldsmith's 
"Animated Nature, " and an occa- 
sional volume of poems, — Southey's 
"Joan of Arc," I remember, for 
there I first saw Greek verse in the 
unknown alphabet, and the effusions 
of Colonel Humphreys and Robert 
Treat Paine. 

My Uncle Joseph, a grave and 
kindly man, who had lived for a tew 
years in the parsonage after 1 'arson 
Abbot vacated it in 1827, was now 
living, a confirmed invalid, in the old 
Cram house, here represented, and 
probably built before 1700. He died 
in December, 1836, before I was five 
years old, and his funeral sermon was 
preached by Rev. Stephen Farley, 
the father of Harriet Farley, one of 



the founders, and for years the editor, 
of the once famous Lowell Offering \ 
written by factory girls, of whom 
Harriet was one. I was sent to the 
Fxeter Road school in the summer 
of 1836, a mile from our house, and 
more than half a mile from my 
uncle's; but, beguiled by some boy 
or girl, I ran up there after school, 
against the injunctions of my sister 
Helen, who had the care of me. I 
remember this incident for two rea- 
sons, it was the only time I recall 
seeing this uncle, and I was much 
afraid of being whipped for my es- 
capade. My uncle sat in the long 
dining-room, in his sick chair, and 
spoke to me in a pleasant manner, 
while my aunt and cousins were in 
and out o! the quaint old room. I 
became well acquainted with the 
house afterward, but this was the 
only time I saw my uncle in it. My 



FRANK B. SANBORN. 



sister Sarah, whose portrait at a 
much later date is here given, came 
up to take me home, and, I suppose, 
held out prospects of punishment by 
my father, for when I saw him, and 
he sent me to wash my feet on the 
bench at the back door, I had great 
fears that a whipping would follow. 
It did not, but my mother put her 
tired son to bed with many injunc- 
tions not to do such a thing again. 

At this time, as near as I remem- 
ber, I was a chubby boy, with long 
light hair, which my Grandmother 
Leavitt used to stroke with her soft 
hand, and call me her "little Dr. 
Franklin." I often visited her and 
my corpulent grandfather, 'Squire 
Tom Leavitt, living in the white 
house near the hill, under the four 
elms, and with his hives of bees be- 
side the well, in full view from his 
east door, near which he sat in his 
justice's chair and read his news- 
papers, or heard cases brought before 
him as justice of the peace, an office 
he held by constant appointment from 
his first commission by Gov. John 
Langdon in 1S05 till his death in 
1852. His three sons had married 
and left home, and two of his daugh- 
ters, my mother being the eldest ; so 
that his house was kept by my Aunt 
Hannah, then about twenty, assisted 
by her mother, who soon became so 
much an invalid that she could do 
little except entertain visitors with 
her pleasant conversation. The farm 
was carried on by a hired man, — at 
first David Forsyth, a Yankee, but 
soon by a north of Ireland Scotch- 
man, John Cochrane, who remained 
for many years. 

With this pleasant homestead many 
of my most delightful recollections 
connect themselves. I was a favorite 



with all, and allowed the range of 
the house, and the orchard, which in 
summer and autumn abounded in 
fruit. There were the bee-hives, 
from which we got delicious honey, 
and there were specialties in my 
aunt's cooking which pleased me 
more than what I had every day at 
home. I was first carried there, so 
far as I remember, in the winter, 
with my father and mother, — I sit- 




Sarah Elizabeth Sanborn. 

ting wrapped up in the bottom of the 
sleigh, — and as we glided along, 
drawn by the horse of my own age, 
or a little older, I noticed how the 
stone walls seemed to run away back- 
wards as we passed by. Occasionally 
I spent the night at this house, and 
distinctly recall the high-post bed- 
stead, into the luxurious featherbed 
of which I had to climb by a chair. 
There, too, I met my cousins from 
Boston, half a dozen city girls and 
boys, who spent some part of their 
vacations at their grandfather's, — 



FRANK B. SANBORN. 



one of them a boy a little older than 
myself, with whom I learned to swim 
in the small stream at the foot of the 
hill. 

I w r as often sent to carry the news- 
paper to my political grandfather, 
who, in return, sent us his agricul- 
tural weekly, for he was a farmer 
with specialties, such as the breeding 
of Durham cattle and bee culture. 



preferred to sit, and in front of which 
he died in December, 1901. In the 
corner opposite the fire stood the tall 
old clock, and there was the book- 
case near by, in which I found and 
learned by heart two or three of the 
plays of Shakespeare, and from which 
I took my great-grandmother's " Scots 
Worthies," with its biographies of 
Knox and his associate Calvinists, 









Thomas Leavitt, Esq. (1808 ) 

He understood the latter better than 
anybody in town, and dealt with his 
bees in a way that astonished boys, 
who did not dare to go near the hives 
for fear of being stung. In the win- 
ter he lived by an open fire in a 
Franklin stove, which came to me 
afterwards, and furnished my poet- 
friend Ellery Channing, during the ten 
years and more that he lived in my 
house, the cheerful blaze by which he 



Hannah (Melcher) Leavitt. 



and the scandalous pamphlet of 
Howie of Lochgoin, "God's Judg- 
ments on Persecutors," aimed spec- 
ially at the Stuart kings and their 
instruments of oppression in Scot- 
land. 

The poetry in our Social Library 
did not much attract me as a child, 
nor was it very good, but at a neigh- 
bor's I found the poems of Burns, 
and my brother Charles had an Amer- 



FRANK B. SANBORN. 



13 



ican edition of Moore's "Melodies," 
on which I feasted, as I did on a 
borrowed edition of Campbell's poems. 
These introduced me to Walter Scott, 
and one of my own first purchases 
was a Philadelphia edition of the 
" Waverley Novels," which I read 
at the age of twelve with the greatest 
delight. I had read the " Scottish 
Chiefs" of Miss Porter earlier, and 
an edition of ' ' Don Quixote ' ' in four 
volumes, printed at Exeter in small 
type, but easily read by young eyes. 
Mrs. Radcliffe's "Romance of the 
Forest " was another novel of which 
I read the first volume only, and did 
not learn till many years after how 
the story came out, for my brother, 
at a muster-field, where books were 
sold by a peddler, bought two cop- 
ies of the first volume, supposing 
he had the whole book, and was 
never able to match them with the 
second. 

All this time I was going to the 
district school, and learning all that 
successive teachers — young women in 
summer, and young men in winter — 
could impart to a boy who took to 
studies of all kinds like a duck to 
water. From my brother Charles I had 
got a smattering of Latin before I was 
ten, and at the age of eleven, a lively 
young schoolmaster, D. W. Barber, 
began to teach me Greek in the town 
school. I learned the alphabet and 
the declension of the Greek article, 
but then my careful father declared 
me too young for that study, and I 
unwillingly gave it up. At the same 
time I was learning all the common 
activities of farming — riding the horse 
to plow and rake hay, driving oxen, 
planting and hoeing corn and pota- 
toes, raking hay and weeding the 
garden, taking care of the barn, chop- 



ping wood, and a dozen other things 
which a boy could do. The work 
did not press, usually, and there was 
plenty of time to learn shooting, at 
first with bow and arrow and after- 
ward with guns, and for playing the 
simple games that country boys then 
understood. Baseball, for instance, 
— not then the angry and gambling 
game it has since become, — and the 
easier games of " one old cat," " two 
old cat," and "drive," played with 
balls; and "truck," played with a 
solid wooden wheel, rolled over the 
ground. 

In such games girls did not join ; 
and the game of cricket, which has 
long prevailed in England, and in 
which girls in school now take part 
there, never was domesticated in New 
England. But there were many less 
active games in which girls in Hamp- 
ton Falls participated. Such were 
" Hy Spy," a hiding sport, where 
one boy or girl stood at a tree, the 
side of a building, or elsewhere, with 
eyes covered, while the rest of the 
children sought hiding places during 
the half minute that the spy was 
counting a hundred. Then they were 
searched for, and when seen the one 
who was " it " called out, " I spy," 
and both ran for the " gool," which 
was the tree, etc., where the spy had 
stood. If the spy got there first, or 
touched the one espied, he or she 
was " it," and the game took a new 
turn. This word " gool " for "goal," 
figured in another game, called indif- 
ferent^ "gool,"' "tag," or "co- 
ram ;" in this two spots were marked 
and called "gools," between which 
the children must run, and could be 
"tagged" or touched anywhere off 
the gools. To decide who should be 
the first catcher in such sports, a 



' \ 



FRANK /:. SANBORN. 



mystic rhyme was recited ; sometimes 
this 

]•.« aa, meena, mcma mike, 

Pestalahni, bony, strike, 
Huldy, guldy, Boo 

hild was pointed at with each 
word, and the first catcher was the 
one on whom the fatal "Boo" fell. 
Another and more elaborate incanta- 
tion was this : 

Wier, brier, limbei luck. 
Five mice all in a Hock 
Sit by thi "K 

• 

The last letter fell to the one who was 
to be "it" in any game. Still 
another rhyme began. 

Intery, mintery, cutery corn. 
Apple-seed, apple-thorn, 

to which the rhyme just cited could 
be added. Iu other . games, like 
"Thread the Needle" or kissing 
games, these rhymes were chanted by 
the little girls, who had better notions 
of song than the boys, — 

Uncle John is very sick. 

What will you please to give him ' 
Three ^ood wish' 3, 
Three good kisses, 

And a pint of ginger. 

( )r else this, — 

William 1 : 

u-courting night and day, 
:d and pistol by his side, 
And Fanny Brown shall he his brid 

In each case the boy was to catch the 
girl and kiss her if he could. In 
'•Thread the Needle," which, like 
most of these sports, was very ancient 
and traditional, like these rhymes 
(though the latter had been much 
changed in passing from one genera- 
tion to another, never being written 
down), the boys and girls formed an 
alley by standing opposite and holding 
hands above the head of the girl who 



walked down this laughing alle; 
this verse was chanted 

Thi- ve no one can pass, 

The thread it run- so true ; 
It has caught many a pretty fail 

And now it has Caught you. 

At which last word the linked anus 
of the last couple dropped down over 
the head of the last girl, and she was 
Subject to lie kissed by the boy of that 
couple. These sports indicate how 
early the natural relation of the 
sexes began to show itself in the sim- 
ple community ; for the boys and girls 
who taught me to play them could 
not have been more than seven years 
old when I learned the rhymes. A 
little later came the sedentary games 
for long evenings, — checkers, morrice 
(which we called " moral "), fox-and- 
geese, and the simplest forms of card- 
playing. Chess came in later, and I 
was twelve at least when I learned 
that game of skill from the minister's 
son in the parsonage across the green 
Whist came about the same time with 
chess, and was diligently pursued f«r 
several winters, the boys meeting 
round at each other's houses and 
playing in the family sitting-room, 
under the eyes of the older people. 
This, in my case, was the "clock 
room," where still stands the tall 
clock, one hundred and thirty years 
old now, which was made by Daniel 
Balch of Xewburyport, ami has kept 
good time for five generations of San- 
borns in the same corner. In other 
houses we played in the long kitchen, 
which was apt t<» be the family sitting- 
room in winter, because better heated 
than the rest of the house, before air- 
tight stives or furnaces came into 
use. The parlor, or "best room," 
was seldom opened to the children, 
except when "company" came to 



FRANK B. SANBORN. 



l 5 



dinner or tea, or for the " nooning " 
on Sundays, at which time our house, 
being near the church, became the 
resort of cousins, aunts, and distant 
parishioners. 

Already in my early boyhood, or 
before, had begun that religious dis- 
integration which gradually changed 
the ancient unity of the town or par- 
ish into a group of warring sects, dis- 
puting more or less zealously about 
infant baptism, original sin, eternal 
punishment, the Trinity, and the 
other points of contention among be- 
lievers nominally Christian, and more 
or less accepting the Bible as the lit- 
eral word of God, both Old and New 
Testaments. 

The last town clergyman who held 
the whole population together around 
his tall pulpit in Hampton Falls, was 
Dr. Samuel Langdon, who came there 
from the presidency of Harvard uni- 
versity in 1780, shaking off the dust 
of that ungrateful "society," as he 
termed it, and burdened with the 
debts contracted in the service of the 
clergy and people of Massachusetts, 
which the new commonwealth for sev- 
eral years neglected to pay, and never 
did pay in full. He was the most 
learned person who ever lived and 
died in the town, and one of the most 
useful ; though his immediate succes- 
sor, Rev. Jacob Abbot, who succeeded 
him as my grandfather's nearest 
neighbor, served the community 
longer, and wnth rather more of the 
modern spirit. Dr. Langdon was of 
the later eighteenth century, parson 
Abbot of the earlier nineteenth ; both 
liberal, philanthropic, and devoted to 
good literature. 

Before Dr. L,angdon's death, in 
November, 1797, the revolting Bap- 
tists had begun to secede from the 



orthodox Congregationalists in other 
towns, but hardly in Hampton Falls ; 
while the Quakers, much more numer- 
ous then, in the towns which made up 
old Hampton, than they are now, or 
have been in my time, had long ab- 
sented themselves from the parish 
meeting-houses. 

Dr. L,angdon brought together in 
the church edifice, near his parson- 
age, more than seventy families, and 




Doctor Langdon's Headstone in Hampton Falls. 

must have had, on pleasant Sundays, 
if the weather was not too freezing for 
the unwarmed house, at least three 
hundred hearers for his learned ser- 
mons, expounding Romans or Reve- 
lations. But it was rumored that he 
was no Calvinist ; and if he chose his 
successor, as probably he did, he must 
have known that young Mr. Abbot 
was Arminian, and did not insist on 
endless damnation for a majority of 
his parishioners. At any rate, such 
proved to be the fact, and very soon 
the Baptists began to hold meetings 
by themselves, and protest against 



i6 



FRANK /»'. SANBORN. 



the ministerial tax collected by the 
town authority and paid over to par- 
son Abbot. A wealthy family of 
Browns led off in this secession, which 
in course of twenty years again di- 
vided, the original seceders calling 
themselves "Christian " Baptists, and 
leaving the Calvinists to organize a 
church later at the "Hill" I as the 
small village was called), and to con- 
nect it with a special school, main- 
tained by Baptists and known, during 



or twenty years. My other grand- 
father, Sanborn, and his elder son, 
Joseph, also joined this society, and 
the latter was it-, treasurer in [832, 
when the town's property in the par- 
sonage lands was sold, and the money 
(about S3, 000) divided between the 
four societies then existing. Some- 
thing more than a fifth part went to 
the Universalists, and the rest was 
divided almost equally between the 
still united Cougregationalists and the 




The Unitarian Church, Hampton Falls. 



the twenty-odd years of its existence, 
as " Rockingham Academy." 

The secession of the Freewill or 
Christian Baptists took place in [805, 
and included several who took that 
mode of signifying their general dis- 
sent from the "standing order" of 
New I'.ngland churches, without at- 
taching any special significance to the 
rite of baptism. Among these was 
my grandfather Leavitt, who, ten 
rs later, headed a movement for a 
Universalis! society in the town, to 
which he and his son-in-law. my 
father, attached themselves for a dozen 



two Baptist chinches, the Christians 
getting more than twice as much as 
the "Calvin-Baptists." Now, seventy 
years later, the Universalists have 
merged in the Unitarians, the two 
Baptist societies mostly in the Calvin- 
ists, while the Cougregationalists 
have divided into 1 nitarian and Trin- 
itarian, neither of them strong socie- 
ties In my boyhood the Universal- 
ists had ceased to hold meetings, and 
their church library had been divided 
among the members, my father re- 
ceiving as his share a two-volume 
history of Universalism, a Life of John 



FRANK B. SANBORN. 



17 



Murray (the Irish Methodist who first 
preached universal salvation in Rock- 
ingham county) , and the sermons of 
Elhanan Winchester, a ' ' Restoration- 
ist"; who, after preaching in New 
England awhile went over to L,ondon 
and founded what became the Fins- 
bury Square Chapel, where W. J. 
Fox, and after him my friend, Mon- 
cure Conway, preached for long years. 

There were other books from this 
source ; but these attracted my boy- 
ish interest, and by reading them 
— never having heard a sermon on the 
subject — I became, at the age of nine, 
a convinced Universalist. But I con- 
tinued to frequent other churches, — 
the Unitarian, near home, and the 
Christian Baptists where now the 
town library is. In the former I heard 
good preaching, by educated men, 
whose books I had read, or was to 
read. Among the Baptists I heard 
spontaneous religious utterances, 
oftentimes from women ; while their 
ministers, or "elders," were without 
much education, but often of good 
natural eloquence. At home I had 
read the Bible from earliest years, so 
that I could perhaps have said at the 
age of twelve that I had read all its 
books through twice ; of course with- 
out much understanding of the mys- 
tical or theological parts. 

To a certain degree, these sec- 
tarian divisions in religion repre- 
sented political opinions also. The 
"standing order" of Congregation- 
alists had been patriots in the Revo- 
lution, Federalists under Washing- 
ton and Adams, and had become 
"Whigs" under the classification 
that I first remember. The seced- 
ing sects, therefore, being at variance 
with the parish ministers, took an 
opposite side in politics ; as the Or- 



thodox were Federalists, the Baptists, 
Methodists, and Universalists became 
Jeffersonian Democrats, — in my time 
followers of Jackson and Van Buren. 
Thus, in Hampton Falls, until the 
Texas question made an issue among 
these Democrats, the Christian Bap- 
tists and Universalists, and some of 
the Unitarians, were mostly Demo- 
crats, while the Calvinists and most 
of the Unitarians were Whigs, and 
supported Harrison in the first presi- 
dential election that I remember. 
Even in 1839, at the age of seven, I 
was taking an interest in politics, as 
my father, grandfather, and elder 
brother did. Charles, afterwards Dr. 
Sanborn, subscribed, in his eighteenth 
year, to the Congressional Globe, of 
the elder Blair, and in that quarto 
record of congressional proceedings I 
became familiar with the names of 
all the senators and congressmen, 
and knew to which party they be- 
longed. I even recall, though I was 
but little more than seven, the ex- 
citement caused by the shooting of 
Cilley, Hawthorne's classmate, a 
Maine congressman, by Graves of 
Kentucky, in a quarrel originating 
with Colonel Webb of the New York 
Courier and Enquirer ; and I fol- 
lowed with interest the contest for 
the speakership in December, 1839, 
which ended with the election of 
Hunter of Virginia. 

Then came on the noisy log-cabin 
campaign between Van Buren in 
power, but burdened with the lack 
of prosperity in the country, and 
Harrison, a military candidate (who 
united in his rather insignificant per- 
son, the elements of general discon- 
tent) , and the powerful leaders of 
the capitalist party of Whigs, such 
as Webster and Clay, Wilson of New 



[8 



FRANK H. SANBORN. 



Hampshire, and Evans of Maine-. 
Knowing nothing of the principles 
involved it there were any' I was a 
warm partisan of Van Buren, while 
the two sons of the new Unitarian 
minister iu the parsonage, Charles 
and Henry Shaw, were ardent 
Whigs. With Henry I had a bet 
pending on the result,— no less than 
the olel "fourpence ha' penny," 
valued at six cents and a quarter, in 
those days of Spanish and Mexican 
coins. I lost the bet, of course, but 
my exultation was great the next 
summer, when Tyler of Virginia, the 
accidental president, vetoed the cur- 
rency and tariff bills of Henry Clay, 
divided his party, and let the Demo- 
crats come- into power in the next 
congress, — even carrying Massachu- 
setts, or a good part of it. New 
Hampshire valiantly supported Van 
Buren, who, on the currency and 
tariff questions, was right, as I now 
view it, and steadily sent a s< lid 
Democratic delegation to cong: 
in both branches. 

I saw little of the leaders in these 
party contests, but Moses Norris, 
who went to congress in [843, wa= a 
nephew of my Grandfather I.eavitt, 
and I remember seeing him in the 
winter of 1842— '43, when he- was a 
candidate, coming to our door in his 
uncle's sleigh to make a call on my 
mother. It must have been in the 
summer of [843 that I first saw his 
. Late, Franklin Pierce, afterwards 
president, and I remember distinctly 

how he looked and was dressed. It 
was in the court house at Exeter, 
where a criminal trial was going on, 
and Pierce had come down from 
Concord to defend Sam George, a 
wild youth of Seabrook, who was 
charged with burning his uncle's 



barn. < >f the merits in the case I 
know nothing, and it is possible* that 
Pierce, who was district attorney for 
Xew Hampshire about that time, 
may have been prosecuting George 
in the United States court, but I 
think not. All that I recall is the 
elegant figure and pleasing face of 
the leading Democrat of the state 
then, and for a do/en years more. 
He was wearing the fashionable dress 
of the period, remembered now 
chiefly because Webster gave it a 
dignity, — the blue coat with brass 
buttons and the nankeen trousers 
strapped over the slender boot. His 
aspect was what Hawthorne after- 
wards described in his campaign life 
of General Pierce : " vivacious, slen- 
der, of a fair complexion, with light 
hair that had a curl in it ; his cheer- 
fulness made a kind of sunshine, yet, 
with all the invariable gentleness of 
his demeanor, he perfectly gave the 
mpressiou of a high and fearless 
spirit." Norris was of another 
make, tall and large and dark, of 
strength almost gigantic, and 
naturally a leader, without the 
graces of leadership. Neither of 
them get full credit now for their 
talents, because they were exerted 
in the cause of human slavery, 
its extension and perpetuation, yet 
both were men of great humanity, 
who would rather do a generous ac- 
tion than a cruel one. 

The contest over the slavery ques- 
tion in New Hampshire began in the 
winter of iS44-'45, and in my very 
neighborhood, for it was the Demo- 
cratic member of congress from 
Rockingham and Strafford, John P. 
Hale of Dover, who revolted against 
the dictation of Pierce, Atherton, 
and Norris in regard to the annexa- 



FRANK B. SANBORN. 



19 



tion of Texas. New Hampshire had 
declared against slavery in 1820, 
when both political parties had 
united in passing resolutions in the 
state legislature, declaring slavery 
wrong and inconsistent with demo- 
cratic institutions. The annexation of 
Texas was favored chiefly by the slave- 
holders and their political allies, and 
the extension and protection of slavery 
was sought to be guaranteed by this 
expansion of our territory, at the risk 
of war with Mexico. The New 
Hampshire Democrats, following the 
lead of Van Buren, had passed reso- 
lutions against annexation, but the 
South had carried its point in 1844, 
nominated a Tennessee slaveholder 
for president, rejecting Van Buren, 
and their national platform favored 
annexing Texas. Mr. Hale, who 
had been nominated by the Demo- 
crats for reelection to congress, came 
out with a letter explaining his vote 
against annexion. 

The "Concord Regency," headed 
by Pierce, demanded that he should 
be dropped from the general ticket 
and another man nominated. When 
this was done, a few men in Exeter, 
Portsmouth, the Hamptons, and that 
neighborhood, called a public meet- 
ing, which took place at Exeter in 
February, 1845, and declared that 
"Independent Democrats" would 
support Hale. They did so, to such 
an extent that Woodbury, the sub- 
stituted nominee, could not be 
elected, and there was a vacancy in 
the delegation till a coalition of 
Whigs and Independents carried the 
state in the election of 1846. 

This contest brought my brother 
Charles, then twenty-three years old, 
into political activity, and made him 
one of the younger leaders of the In- 



dependent Democracy in that part of 
New Hampshire. He had till then 
been occupied wholly with farm 
labors or with teaching, but had been 
a wide reader of political and social 
literature, and had many friends and 
followers in the towns where he was 
known. 

Though but thirteen years old, I 
sympathized entirely with him in his 
views. I had been much indebted 




Charles Henry Sanborn (1846). 

to him for aiding my education, out 
of school, and teaching me much in 
the use of tools and the art of shoot- 
ing, in both of which he had made 
himself more expert than I ever be- 
came. He was a good cabinet 
maker, self-instructed, a good 
draughtsman, and in other ways 
handy, which I was not, though 
willing to learn. He had taught 
himself Datin and French, and other- 
wise had qualified himself beyond 
what was common among the youth 
of his time and place ; and he had 



20 



FRANK />'. SANBORN. 



an ambition, afterwards gratified, to 
practice a profession. His experi- 
ences of the heart had been unhap- 
py : the sweet girl to whom he was 
attached having died before they 
could be married. 

In 1846 he became an assistant in 
the office of the anti-slavery secretary 
of state in Concord, and also aided 




F B Sanborn (1849), /& 

in editing the party newspaper, the 
Independent Democrat^ which did 

much to turn New Hampshire from 
the pro-slavery Democracy to what 
was afterwards organized as the Re- 
publican party. 

His portrait, here engraved, was 
taken in Concord at that time. It 
represents him at the age of (nearly) 
twenty-five, seriously handsome, and 



much resembling his mother's family, 
the Leavitts. My own first portrait 
was taken three years later, when I 
was seventeen, ami both were called 
good likenesses at the time. 

It will he seen that the portrait 
above is that of a scholar, or, per- 
chance, a poet, rather than a finan- 
cier. My finances up to the age of 
seventeen were slender, and were 
chiefly expended for books or maga- 
zines. They were derived from small 
payments made to me for small labors 
on the neighboring farms, or the care 
of Widow Perkins' barn and wood- 
shed ; which I had for the most part 
until I entered college. To this were 
added small tips from visiting cousin- 
or other persons who shared the am- 
ple hospitalities of my father and 
my two grandfathers ; and the sales 
which I occasionally made of walnuts 
gathered in October. When in my 
twelfth year I visited Boston for the 
first time, my pocket money must 
have heen supplied by my father : 
and was expended in part for an 
American edition of "Hudibras." 
which I bought at a book-stall near 
the Faneuil Hall market. I had 
made the acquaintance of this hu- 
morous poem by some citations in 
"Newman's Rhetoric"; but was 
much disappointed in the story, 
which seemed to me, after " Don 
Quixote," fiat and tiresome. < >n this 
visit I saw Adelaide Phillips (sub- 
sequently a famous singer) in a 
child's part at the Boston Museum, 
long owned by Moses Kimball who 
was my associate in later years. 



CHAPTER 



HEREDITARY INFLUENCES. SANBORNS, TOWLES AND LEAVITTS- 



Having established my own ex- 
istence in the first chapter, with some 
account of the immediate environ- 
ment around my childhood and 
youth, it is proper next to consider 
the antecedents. Every person, by 
inheritance, is but a kind of net re- 
sult of thousands of ancestors, both 
for his physical and mental structure. 
We understand heredity, as yet, very 
little in its details; but of its general 
effect there can be no doubt. The 
puzzle is to reconcile multiplicity 
with unity ; the individual is one, 
his forefathers are innumerable. Is 
he, am I, a composite photograph 
of the multitude, or has some syndi- 
cate, or some powerful antecedent 
unit, impressed on me characteristics 
not of the generality, but specially 
traceable to him or them ? I incline 
to the latter alternative, not only 
from a general survey of the field of 
heredity, but from special facts in 
my own genealogy. 

The Sambornes of England, who 
came over with their grandfather, 
the Puritan ejected minister, Rev. 
Stephen Bachiler, were purely Eng- 
lish, so far as known; but possibly 
Norman rather than Saxon, and per- 
haps with a comparatively recent 
French admixture, through the Bach- 
ilers, with their kindred, the Merci- 
ers, Priaulx, etc. The Leavitts, my 
mother's ancestors, were also purely 
English, but from more northern 
and eastern counties, — Lincoln or 



Yorkshire, instead of Wilts and 
Hampshire. No Irish strain ap- 
pears in either line until some gene- 
rations after the migration. Bach- 
ilers and Sambornes and Husseys, 
all kindred, were among the found- 
ers of Hampton; Leavitts, of two 
different stocks, were among the 
founders of the next town, Exeter. 
A certain connection by affinity 
seems to have existed between my 
ancestor, Thomas Leavitt, and his 
pastor, Rev. John Wheelwright, who, 
with the first Wentworth, and two- 
score others, founded Exeter. But 
nothing not English appears in that 
line; the wife of the first Leavitt 
being the daughter of John Bland, a 
good English name. 

Now about 1650 there appeared in 
Hampton, N. H., a stalwart Irish- 
man, Philip Towle, called a "sea- 
man," and of course a Protestant, 
who in 1657 married a daughter of 
the same Isabella Bland from whom, 
through the Leavitts, I am de- 
scended. At the age of sixty-two 
he had a son Caleb, who mar- 
ried Zipporah, daughter of Anthony 
Brackett (an Indian fighter whom 
the Indians slew), and had eleven 
children, all but one leaving families. 
Caleb's son Philip, grandson of Cap- 
tain Brackett, married Lydia Dow, 
and had a daughter Esther, who 
married Benjamin Leavitt, great- 
grandson of Isabella Bland, and 
therefore second cousin of Esther 






FRANK /•'. SANBORN. 



Towle. About the same time my 
otlu-r great-grandfather, Benjamin 

Sanborn, married Anna Towle, sec- 
ond cousin of Esther, so that by 
those two marriages the Towle in- 
fluence gave me a double chance of 
inheritance. 

From the Towles came the great 
height and size which some of the 
Sanborns and some of the Leavitts 
have since shown. A son ot Anna 




Hon. Moses Norris, Jr. 

(Towle) Sanborn, my great-uncl< 
John, was about the stature of 
Abraham Lincoln, and ot enormous 
strength. From Esther's daughter, 
Comfort Leavitt, who married Moses 
Xorris of Pittsfield, my mother's 
cousin. Xorris the Congressman and 
Senator, derived his height and physi- 
cal strength. My own stature, and 
such strength as I have had, evi- 
dently came from the same source, 
tor neither the Sanborns nor the 
Leavitts, in their own lines, were 
above the common size. 



Moreover, this slight Irish admix- 
ture seems to have introduced a gay 
and active turn of mind, often v< 
ing on eccentricity, which was hardly 
natural either to the Sanborn, or the 
Leavitt stock. From old Parson 
Bachiler the Sanborns might have 
derived, and doubtless did, vigor and 
independence, which were his traits: 
but liveliness, ambition, black hair 
and fair complexions, with an occa- 
sional turn for music, and escapades, 
came to the Leavitts from old Philip 
Towle. 

When an old lady, recently, look- 
ing at me carefully, and hearing me 
talk with something of the Hibernian 
liveliness, said to me: " You were 
intended for a rogue," I said to my- 
self, as Emerson did on a different 
occasion, " This is a saying in which 
I find a household relationship." 
Therefore, when Colonel Higginson, 
Mrs. Da.ll, and others fancy thej 
in me some outward signs of descent 
from Daniel Webster's " black Bach- 
iler " ancestor, the old parson. I 
cannot deny the fact: but know in 
my own mind that my complexion 
and physical traits come from the 
Leavitts. When Esther Leavitt en- 
tered the Hampton Falls meeting- 
house with her sons Jonathan, Reu- 
ben, Brackett, and her daughter 
Lydia, for whom my mother was 
named, she could not help showing 
pride in her handsome children ; and 
her deep religions sentiment did not 
make her regard it as a sin. My 
mother, as I remember her, to the 
of sixty hail the traditional Irish 
beauty jet-black hair of great length 
and thickness, clear blue eyes with 
long lashes, and a complexion of 

clear white and red. which descended 
to several of her children. Others ot 



FRANK B. SANBORN. 



23 






them followed the Sanborn type, with 
equally fair complexions, but with- 
out the sparkling eyes and thick 
dark hair. 

There was an early admixture 
from another source in the Sanborn 
line, by the marriage of Mary Gove 
(daughter of Edward Gove, the pris- 
oner of London Tower) to Joseph 
Samborne, son of the first John, and 
the first of the name to reside where 
I was born. Although Edward 
Gove's descendants became peaceful 
Quakers in considerable number, his 
own temper was far from peaceful 
at times, and he had involved him- 
self in a dispute with his powerful 
neighbor, Nathaniel Weare, who was 
long active in the magistracy of New 
Hampshire. Notwithstanding this, 
Gove was often chosen to important 
local office, was a captain in the mili- 
tia, and a man of property enough 
to make the confiscation of it a mat- 
ter of interest to Governor Cranfield, 
who in 1683 procured his arrest, trial 
and sentence to death for high trea- 
son. It was an absurd name for his 
offence, which was an armed demon- 
stration against James II and the 
Tories who then held sway in the 
new Province of the Weares, Cutts, 
Husseys and Sambornes. 

He was sent to England under the 
escort of Edward Randolph, the great 
enemy of Puritan rule in New r Eng- 
land, and lodged in the Tower under 
strict guard, about the time that the 
leaders of his party in England, Lord 
Russell and Algernon Sidney, were 
imprisoned there, preliminary to their 
execution. But Gove was soon seen 
to be a harmless man, and nobod) T in 
England, even in that bloody time, 
urged his beheading. His neighbor, 
Weare, visiting England in the in- 



terest of the planters and merchants 
of the province, secured the resigna- 
tion of Cranfield through the influ- 
ence of Savile, Lord Halifax ; and 
soon after, the pardon and return 
of Gove to that part of Hampton 
which is now Seabrook. He recov- 
ered his forfeited estate, some part of 
wdiich seems to have come to his 
daughter by way of dowry. She 
was married at the age of sixteen to 
my ancestor, two short months only 
before her father's sentence to death, 
and in the foot company of Hampton 
which arrested him, and put his 
mounted men in custody, her father- 
in-law, Lieut. John Samborne, was 
an officer. 

Thirty years before, when this 
Lieut. John and Edward Gove were 
young men, they had joined Sam- 
borne's uncle, Christopher Hussey of 
Hampton, in a petition to the Massa- 
chusetts General Court in favor of 
Robert Pike of Salisbury (where 
Gove w r as then living), who had 
given offence by his free speech to 
the Puritan oligarchy. For this 
Hussey and Samborne were fined, 
but Gove seems to have escaped 
notice. He had been a member of 
the Provincial Assembly just before 
his arrest in 1683, and was a lead- 
ing man. 

After his return to Hampton he 
was chosen, along with Weare and 
others, to frame a temporary consti- 
tution for the Province, after the 
imprisonment of Sir Edmund Andros, 
and his name is signed, January 24, 
1690, to the only copy of this brief 
and sensible document known to 
exist. Little more than a year later 
(May 29, 1691) he died. Various 
legends and traditions survived him, 
and are still kept alive by credulity 



?4 



FRANK' /,'. S A N/1 OR N. 



or ignorance, — that he was a hard 
drinker, was insane after leaving the 
Tower, and believed himself to haw- 
been slowly poisoned in his food 
there. His important offices before 
and after his imprisonment discredit 
these stories. He was probably a 
person of excitable and rather eccen- 
tric temper, and in other respects a 
good citizen, of more than ordinary 
intelligenoe. His son and his ser- 
vant, William Healey, joined in his 
demonstration, and were long in 
prison for it. 

His contemporary. Lieutenant Sam 
borne, had been briefly imprisoned 
by Cranfield in 1684, for refusing to 
pay quitrents on his land in Hamp- 
ton, which Robert Mason claimed to 
own. He escaped from the Hampton 
jail, probably by the connivance of 
the jailer. 

I thought of these imprisoned an- 
tors when the I nited States Sen- 
ate had me illegally arrested in i860, 
but I was discharged by the Massa- 
chusetts court the next day, without 
:^oing to prision. I have since visited 
main - prisons as their official inspector. 

By my maternal grandmother's 
line (Hannah Melcher, descended 
from Edward Melcher of Portsmouth) 

I am connected by descent with 
nearly all those early Hampton fami- 
lies from whom I am not descended 
through the Sanborns, Leavitts and 
Towles. But I still hold the chief 
part of my heredity as coming from 

the Lcavitts and their Irish kin. 
My Othei ancestors were yeomen, 

deacons, petty officers in the towns, 

and industrious farmers tilling their 
own land: but the Leavitts, after the 
Irish infusion, began to get more 
education and push their fortunes 
farther. My grandfather, Thomas 



Leavitt, and his father, Benjamin, 
were land surveyors, as George 
Washington, St. John de Creve- 
coeur, John Brown and Henry Tho- 
reau were,- a pursuit that implied 
education, accuracy, and some knowl- 
edge of the world. 'Squire Tom's 
oldest brother, Jonathan Leavitt, was 
an officer in the Revolution, after- 
wards a merchant, and one of the 
first citizens of Passamaquoddy, now 
Eastport, Me. There he came into 
acquaintance with the Lesdernier, or 
Delesdernier, family, of Swiss origin, 
and still keeping up the French lan- 
guage, which was that of their na- 
tive Geneva. 

When the celebrated Albert Galla- 
tin, adventuring to America in 1780, 
reached Boston from Gloucester, 
where he landed, he was taken in 
charge by the Lesderniers, went with 
some of them to Machias, and spent 
a year on the Maine coast, trading 
with Indians, paddling in canoes, 
and learning English from the Les- 
derniers and their friends. Then he 
got an appointment in Harvard Col- 
lege to teach French, and soon found 
his way to Virginia and Pennsylva- 
nia, where he became a Democratic 
leader. 

The Leavitts were also Democrats, 
as most of the Revolutionary soldiers 
in New Hampshire were, and my 
grandfather, appointed a justice of 
the peace by John I.an-don. soon 
became a local leader of the party in 
his region. A.S a young man he was 
active and gay, and his sons, Ben- 
son, Joseph and Anthony Bracken 
(named by his Grandmother Esther 
for her ancestor, the slain Indian 
fighter) had the same activity, and 
soon left the little town to seek for- 
tune elsewh( 



FRANK B. SANBORN. 



25 



Joseph was to be the heir of his 
childless uncle, Brackett Leavitt, in 
Pittsfield, where his cousin Norris, 
afterwards senator, was growing up 
and getting an education. But the 
uncle was cut off by sudden death, 
and the boy returned home till he 
was old enough to be taken in charge 
\>y another uncle, his mother's broth- 
er, in Boston. Benson also went to 
Boston ; in time the two brothers 
became merchants in a prosperous 
way at the North End, and in 1843, 
when I first visited my cousins, their 
children, they were living in the two 
tenements of a double house in Fleet 
Street, not far from Father Taylor's 
Seamen's Chapel. A few years after 
Dr. Edward Beecher was living in 
Charter Street, opposite \\\y Uncle 
Benson's house at that time, and 
I called on Mrs. Stowe there, fresh 
from her success in " Uncle Tom's 
Cabin." 

A certain sad romance, which 
could not extinguish my Uncle 
Brackett's natural gaiety of heart, 
followed his efforts to establish him- 
self in the world. He married early 
and migrated to Ann Arbor in Michi- 
gan ; was attacked there by the fever 
of the region, nearly died, and re- 
turned with his wife and son to his 
father's house to recover health. 
There I remember him with his 
violin, playing and singing — the 
family all having that gift — and 
amusing a child like me. Then he 
disappeared, going this time to 
Orange, near Hanover, N. H., where 
he bought a farm and carried it on 
without much success. Presently'he 
tried a new move, and w r ent to Illi- 
nois, some ten years after Ellery 
Channing had done the same thing 
in a more northern count v. The 



California gold fever in i848-'49 
attacked my uncle, too ; he left his 
wife and young family near Peoria, 
111., and crossed the Plains to Cali- 
fornia, where he was prospering, as 
he wrote ; but presently tidings of 
him ceased. Long afterwards it was 
learned that he had been murdered, 
and his property taken. Not even 
the place of his death is certainly 
known to his children, one of whom, 
Thomas Leavitt, has been a state 
official of Illinois, after an honorable 
career in the Civil War. 

Another Thomas Leavitt, son of 
my Uncle Joseph, and named, like 
Brackett's son, for his grandfather, 
was killed in an Indian fight in what 
is now Dakota, as a lieutenant of 
an Iow r a regiment, enlisted for the 
Civil War, but turned aside to fight 
the Sioux in the Northwest. 

His father, whom I was said much 
to resemble in stature and features, 
had died of consumption after a long 
illness, when I was about sixteen. 
This uncle had the same cheerful 
turn of mind, and endured his mal- 
ady w r ith great patience. 

My grandfather, the old 'Squire, 
born in 1774, was by 1844 verging 
on seventy ; the loss of his sons, the 
illness of his wife, and the compara- 
tive neglect of his affairs by his ab- 
sorption in politics, where he did not 
find the official promotion he hoped 
for, had combined with increasing 
age to diminish his natural high 
spirits. He was somewhat given to 
bewailing the degeneracy of the 
times ; his sons, who faithfully looked 
after his affairs, were Whigs, his 
grandsons, Charles and myself, were 
anti-slavery youths ; he remained a 
Jackson Democrat, as did my father. 
This caused the old gentleman some 



26 



FRANK /.'. SANBORN. 



pangs, but his kindness of heart and 
his interest in the family continued. 
!!• visited his descendants in Huston. 

and carried his snuffbox into their 
parlors and those of their friends. 
< )n his last visit, about [850, he -at 
for his daguerreotype, as lie had sat 
more than forty years before, to his 
Carolina friend. James Akin, and this 
final portrait, as I chiefly remember 
him, adorns this page. He died in 




T Leavitt, /Et 75. 

[852, when I was fitting for college 
at Exeter, and I was struck, in look- 
ing at his dead face in the coffin, to 
see so much of the youthful expres- 
sion there wit 771 which Akin had 
caught in his slight sketch of [808. 
'file fair and smooth check, the i li 
cut features, had taken on an earlier 
expression : and much of this youth- 
ful look was afterwards reproduced in 
the features and air of my son Victor, 
who has investigated the genealogy 
of his ancestors i n Old England and 
New. 



So much for the chapter of hered- 
ity. I quite agree, however, with old 
Master John Sullivan, father of two 
state governors, John of New Hamp- 
shire (the General), and James of 
Massachusetts, and grandson, as he 
said, of four Irish countesses, that 
men must be valued for what they are, 
not for what their forefathers may 
have been. Writing at the age ol 
to his son, the General, the retired 
schoolmaster quoted a Latin pair of 
distichs, which in English run thus : 

Was Adam all men's -irt.- . and Eve their mother ? 
Then how can one be nobler than another? 
Ennobled are we not by sire or dame, 
Till life and conduct give tis noble faun . 

Philosophers, who seek to know the 
causes of things, are apt to be inter- 
ested, however, in the manifold influ- 
ences that make men individuals, 
no two alike, even in the same house 
hold, — and it is in the ancestry that 
we must look for certain determining 
causes, before environment and edu- 
cation begin to do their modifying 
work on the newly-arrived inhabitant 
of earth. Of that environment it is 
now time to say something. As I re- 
marked in a chapter on " The New 
Hampshire Way of Life," which my 
son, Mr. Victor Sanborn of Kcmil- 
worth, 111., induced me to write for 
his copious " Sanborn Genealogy " : 

"for many years the bulk of the 
New Hampshire people were farmers 
arm laborers ; the mechanics, 
except in the largest towns, worked 
on their own land, or sonic neigh- 
bor's, a part of the year ; and the 
parish minister, the country doi 
and lawyer, and the village school- 
master all had farms, large or small. 
Originally, each parish had its par- 
sonage or manse, to which more oi 
less land was attached ; this the par- 
son and his sons, with a hired man. 



FRANK B. SANBORN. 



27 






cultivated, like his parishioners. 
The shoemaker who made my first 
pair of boots had a few acres, at- 
tached to the old house in which he 
lived and had his bench ; the black- 
smith at the corner of the road might 
also be a farmer ; and the carpenters 
and cabinet-makers, if they prospered 
at all, became landowners. At first 
there may have been less of this ' ter- 
ritorial democracy,' as Lord Beacons- 
field styled it, in New Hampshire 
than in Plymouth and some other 
colonies. A considerable tendency 
manifested itself among the Cutts, 
Champernowns, Atkinsons, Wal- 
drons, Gilmans, Dudleys, Weares, 
etc., to establish a distinct, class of 
gentry, such as existed in England ; 
and the Wentworths and their con- 
nections maintained an ofshoot of 
the Anglican church in Portsmouth, 
as did the royal governors and others 
in Boston. But the influences of a 
new country, combining with Calvin- 
ism, especially where the settlers 
were chiefly from the yeomanry and 
tradesmen of England and Northern 
Ireland, as in New Hampshire, soon 
brought about a virtual democracy. 
Education, however, was always 
highly valued there, and most of the 
towns in Rockingham county had a 
learned minister or two, preaching to 
the majority of the people, catechis- 
ing the children in church and school, 
and often promoting the higher edu- 
cation by opening libraries, giving 
instruction in Latin, and encouraging 
the brighter boys to go to the acad- 
emy or to college. 

' ' In my own town much was done 
in this way by Dr. Langdon, a re- 
tired president of Harvard College, 
and his successor in the ministry, 
Rev. Jacob Abbot, a first cousin of 
Dr. Abbot of Exeter Academy,— 
both good scholars of wide reading 
and public spirit, who from 1781 to 
1827 preached in the meeting house 
near by, and lived in the old parson- 
age, which was burnt in 1859. At 
the southern end of the town, after 
Parson Abbot's retirement, the Bap- 
tists set up their ' Rockingham Acad- 



emy, ' a sectarian high school, but not 
specially sectarian ; so that for a town 
of 700 people and small wealth, 
Hampton Falls was well equipped 
with the means of education. 

" The old-fashioned district school 
was in full swing when I was a boy ; 
in it everything might be taught, 
from the alphabet upwards, to both 
sexes and many ages ; there might 
be pupils of 20 taught in winter by a 
youth of 15; often by a' college stu- 
dent, released in the winter term to 
pay his college bills by the money 
earned as schoolmaster. Francis 
Bo wen, the professor and author, 
while a student in Harvard, taught in 
our ' Red Schoolhouse,' and boarded 
with Deacon Dane, rny grandfather's 
cousin, whose father had inherited 
Dr. Langdon 's globes and wig. The 
advantages of such a school were ob- 
vious ; for though the teacher might 
have 40 pupils in 30 classes, to be 
taught in 340 minutes, at the rate of 
13 minutes to each class, — yet the 
3-ounger learned so much from hear- 
ing their elders recite, that perhaps 
as much knowledge, irregularly 
gained, got into the heads of bright 
scholars as is now insinuated more 
methodically by young women skilled 
in the newer modes of teaching. 
The terms were short, and arranged 
to meet the necessities of farm-labor, 
in which most children, even girls, 
took some part. They weeded gar- 
dens, picked apples and potatoes, 
husked corn, carried grain to mill, 
and with their mothers did much of 
the marketing, both buying and sell- 
ing. In berry time they gathered 
raspberries, huckleberries, blueber- 
ries, wild blackberries, cranberries 
and barberries ; and the women of 
poorer families carried these about to 
the farmhouses for sale, taking in 
payment provisions or clothing for 
their families, as did the Barrington 
basket-making gypsies, in their semi- 
annual rounds. One of the latter 
class, ' Hippin Pat Leathers ' (a 
woman) of Whittier's ' Yankee Zin- 
cali,' used to whine at my grand- 
father's door, ' Haint ye got nerry 



•s 



FRANK /?. SANBORN. 



nold jacket, nerry nold gaownd, 
nerry nold pair traowses fur tu gimme 
fur this "ere basket ? ' The huckle- 
berry women from Seabrook carried 
away from the same door salt pork in 
a pail, butter and cheese, and other 
means of stocking the Byfield larder." 

All this I have seen still surviving ; 
but the worst of the rum-drinking 
times had yielded, before my recollec- 
tion, to the efforts of the early tem- 
perance reformers. I have seen simi- 
lar cases, but it was in Essex county 
that Arthur Gilman, the architect 
(born in Newbury port), used to place 
the scene of his hero who went about 
sawing wood for the "forehanded 
folks," and took his pay in rum. 
One Saturday he had worked for the 
village 'squire, and was offered for 
the task a pint of the beverage. ' 'Oh, 
now, 'Squire, can't ye make it a 
quart? Haow kin a man keep Sun- 
day on a pinto' rum : " " Nonsense, 
Jim; you haven't earned more 'n a 
pint, — can't you keep the Sabbath on 
that much?" "Wa-al, 'Squire, ef 
you say so, I s'pose I must : but jest 
think on 't, — haow will it be kep' ? " 

The seafaring class', who were 
rather numerous in the old town of 
Hampton, and in Seabrook, Salisbury 
and Rye, were specially liable to the 
tippling habit ; and when they went 
long voyages were apt to come back 
with their morals injured. Hut they 

were notable seamen, and great fight- 
ers when any naval war gave them a 
chance. My mother's cousin, Lewis 
Leavitt, perhaps named lor Lewis 
-dernier oi Quoddy, where In- 
lived, was famous in the annals of the 
family for his skill in navigating from 
Eastport to Boston in the worst 

weather and the darkest night. 
Whether this anecdote of him is fad 



or fiction I cannot say with confi- 
dence ; but it was told and believed 
among his kindred. He was skip- 
per of a coaster, which in the War of 
1812 was captured by a British frig- 
ate. A prize crew was put on board, 
and she was headed for Halifax. 
Captain Leavitt watched his chance, 
and at night, when only the watch 
and the man at the wheel were on 
deck, he applied his great strength 
to them, threw them successively 
down the hatchway, fastened the 
hatches down, took the wheel him- 
self, and steered his schooner into a 
friendly port. He was Esther Towle's 
grandson. 

In simple communities such as I re- 
member, maiden aunts were a power 
and a blessing. One of them, in the 
neighborhood of Boston, once told 
Theodore Parker, "The position of 
a maiden aunt is not to be despised, 
Mr. Parker ; without maiden aunts 
the world could not be peopled, sir." 
In the nursing and pupilage of New 
Hampshire children the aunt bore a 
great part. I had three maiden 
aunts, my mother's youngest sister, 
who stayed at home and kept her 
father's house, and after his death 
carried on the farm ; and two elder 
sisters of my father, who lived with 
him in the old house where they were 
born. Aunt Dolly, his half sister, 
had been brought up, as I have men- 
tioned, by her grandmother, Anne 
Towle Sanborn, who humored her, 
but kept her in a narrow dom< 
circle, from which courtship and 
marriage never emancipated her. 
She had the ways of the iSth cen- 
tury, just as she had its dishes and 
waiming- pans, and ideas of costume. 
Never did she go farther from the 
houses of her relatives than to Ken- 



FRANK B. SANBORN. 



29 



sington, whence her mother, whom 
she never knew, had come ; even 
Exeter, the " Suffield " of Miss 
Alice Brown, was almost unknown 
to her, though but five miles away. 
She was purely domestic ; had 
certain cooking " resaits " that had 
come down to her, and that nobody 
else could manage ; sat in her room 
or lay in her bed, and knew the 
ownership of every horse that passed 
the house, by his step. "I wonder 
where Major Godfrey was gwine this 
mornin' ? His horse went down the 
Hampton road about half-past four." 
She watched the passer-by with an 
interest hard for the young to under- 
stand ; the narrow limits of her exis- 
tence developed curiosity in a micro- 
scopic degree. The wayfarer, though 
a fool, as she was apt to think him, 
was not an indifferent object to her. 
She kept track, too, of the minutest 
family incidents ; would remind me 
the next morning, when I came in 
late at night from some visit, or a 
private cooking-party in the pine- 
woods, "The clock struck two jest 
after you shet the door, Frank." But 
she had sympathy with youth, and 
withheld such revelations from the 
head of the family; though you 
would not have said that discretion 
was her strong point. She outlived 
all her brothers and sisters but one, 
and was a neighborhood oracle as to 
births, deaths and marriages, without 
ever leaving the fireside in her latest 
years. 

Aunt Rachel was a very different 
person. Born five years later (1789) 
and dying some years earlier, she had 
a most sympathetic, pathetic and at- 
tractive character. Fair and delicate 
of complexion, blue-eyed, with pleas- 
ing features, a sweet, rather sad voice, 



she spent her later years (when alone 
I knew her), in caring for others. 
As a child she had been a favorite 
at Dr. Langdon's, who lived just 
across a little common and died when 
she was but eight years old ; but the 
family, including Miss Betsy Lang- 
don, the granddaughter, remained in 
the parish longer. A little Italian 
engraving from the parsonage was 
always hung in her ' 'parlor chamber. ' ' 
She continued intimate at the parson- 
age, in the time of the Abbots ; and 
and their children, of whom there 
were many, grew up under her eye, 
and were cared for by her in their 
earlier and after years. Aunt Rachel 
was skilled in all household arts, par- 
ticularly in spinning, weaving and 
gardening ; had her beds of sage and 
lavender, her flowers of the older 
kinds, introduced from Dr. Langdon's 
garden, I suppose ; and was the 
maker of simple remedies from herbs, 
delicious wines from currants, and 
metheglin from honey and other for- 
gotten ingredients. Mr. Treadwell's 
"Herb-Gatherer," that pleasing 
poem which he sent from Connecticut 
to Ellery Channing, and which Chan- 
ning revised until it seemed almost 
his own, and gave to me to print in 
the Springfield Republican, had 
touches that recalled my dear aunt to 
me, after many years. 

Aunt Rachel had her romance in 
youth ; a pretty creature, she had 
been wooed by one who, wandering 
about in the wider world little seen by 
her, found some richer or more bril- 
liant match, and broke off the engage- 
ment. This happened long before I 
was born, and I never saw him ; but 
I believe the fine musket in which I 
learned to insert the bullets I had run 
in the wooden mould, and sometimes 



3° 



FRANK />. SANIWRN. 



hit the target with them, was his 

once, an<l had his initials in the silver 
mounting. He had wounded a tender 

heart with a more cruel weapon : ami 
I fancied I read regrets for the dream 
of youth in the tears I sometimes saw- 
falling, as my aunt spun in the long 
garret at the west window of which I 
sat and read my Waverley Novels. 
Her sifter, nine years younger, had 
made an unlucky marriage, with 
many children and much hardship ; 
and Aunt Rachel was often called to 
go to Brentwood and look after the 
young family and the delicate mother, 
who seemed to have inherited con- 
sumption (according to theories then 
] >re vailing) from her mother, my 
grandmother Sanborn, who died eight 
years before I was born. She per- 
formed this duty cheerfully : had 
taken care of her own mother in her 
last illness, then of her father and 
i ; and of many invalids who died 
or recovered. These charities called 
her much from home, and I saw far 
less of her than of Aunt Dolly, her 
half-sister, wdio was as much a part of 
the old house as the oak arm-chair in 
the kitchen, or the chimney corner 
cat. lint she impressed my imagina- 
tion more ; she was gentle by nature 
and by grace, and deserves not to be 
forgotten. Had I been blessed with 
a daughter, I would have named her 
Rachel. 

I have mentioned her spinning. 
( M the hundred farmhouses in the 
town when I was ten years old, more 
than fifty must have had looms, and 
all had the large spinning wheel for 
wool spinning. The garret of every 
one contained disused (lax wheels, al- 
though a few farmers still grew llax, 
lovely with its blue (lowers. But all 
kept sheep, and sheared them in 



June ; then had the wool made up in 
great bundles, wrapt in old linen 
sheets, spun and woven by an earlier 
generation, and pinned up with thorns 
from the bush ol white thorn in the 
pasture, to be carried to the carding- 
mill. It was then brought home in 
"rolls " spun into yarn by the women 
of the house, and woven into cloth or 
knit into socks, buskins and mittens for 
the family. This homespun cloth was 
then sent to the " fulling-mill " to be 
dyed and fulled : finally brought back 
to be cut by the neighborhood tailor 
and made up into suits for the family, 
by the "tailoress." who went about 
from house to house for the purpose. 
Of the children at the district school, 
not more than one in twenty wore any- 
thing in winter but this home-made 
cloth. In summer they wore the cheap 
cotton from the New England factories, 
and calicoes of the "ninepenny" vari- 
ety. The boys mostly went barefoot 
till twelve, and the girls sometimes. 

Gradually, after 1840, the town be- 
came dotted with shoe shops, where 
the young men and some of their 
elders made sale shoes for the manu- 
facturers of Lynn and Haverhill ; the 
women in the houses "binding" the 
uppers before the soles were stitched 
on in the shoe shops. My brother 
and I learned this art ; he to perfec- 
tion, I rather awkwardly ; and it was 
from the profits of my first box of 
shoes that I paid the cost of my foot 
journey to the White Mountains, in 
September, 1850. Soon after this I 
began to prepare for Harvard College, 
at the suggestion of dear friends, and 
had no difficulty in entering a year in 
advance, in July, [852. Up to that 
time I had mostly lived at home in 
the surroundings described, taking 
part in the labors and the leisure por- 



FRANK B. SANBORN. 



3i 



trayed in my first chapter. The ac- 
companying portrait, from a daguer- 
reotype taken in 1853, represents the 
student and lover that I was, during 
this period of my ' ' obscure and golden 
youth," as Thoreau says. Amid 
many anxieties and mortifications, I 



was happy, by reason of the romantic 
love which my next chapter will 
relate. It was a part, and an idyllic 
part, of my New Hampshire life ; and 
with its close I became a citizen of 
Massachusetts and the world. 




Frank Sanborn (August, 1853), /Et. 21 



CHAPTER 



MOUTHFUL I.OVi: AND MARRIAGE. 



Up to my eighteenth year I had 

lived fancy free, though very suscep- 
tible to the beauty of girls, and slight- 
ly attached, at school and in the 
society of my companions, to this 
maiden or that who had fine eyes, a 
fair complexion and a social gift. To 
one pair of sisters, indeed, I was 
specially drawn by their loveliness 
and gentle ways. Toward the younger 
of the two, of my own age almost ex- 
actly, I had early manifested this in- 
terest when my years could not have 
exceeded seven. They had come with 
their cousin, who was also my cousin, 
to spend the afternoon and take tea 
with my two sisters ; it may have 
been the first time I had noticed the 
sweet beauty of Sarah C, who was 
the granddaughter of the former par- 
son of the parish. So strongly was I 
impressed by it. that while they were 
taking tea by themselves, boys not 
being expected to enjoy their com- 
pany, I went to my strong box, which 
contained all my little stock of silver, 
took from it a shining half dollar, the 
largest coin I had, and deftly trans- 
ferred it to the reticule of Sarah, 
hanging on the back of a chair in the 
" parlor chamber," all without telling 
anybody what I had done. The two 
girls (aged seven and ten) went home 
unsuspecting what hail occurred, but 
in emptying the reticule that night, 
the coin was found, and Sarah know- 
ing nothing about it, the gift was 
sent back to the house of the tea- 



party, and my little scheme of endow- 
ing her with my worldly goods was 
discovered, to my confusion. 

There had been other fancies, but 
nothing serious until the year i 
when I was just eighteen. Xor hail 
I taken the burden of life very seri- 
ously in other directions. I had 
formed no scheme of life : my educa- 
tion had been going on as already 
described, with no particular plan on 
my part or that of my family. My 
mother's cousin, Senator Xorris, be- 
ing in Congress from 184;, until his 
death in 1855, it had been suggested 
that he should appoint me a cadet in 
the West Point military school; but I 
had no turn for a soldier's life, and 
nothing was done to obtain his pat- 
ronage, which my grandfather, a vet- 
eran Democrat, could have seemed, 
perhaps. So I drifted along, working 
on the farm perhaps half my time, 
studying, shooting, wandering about 
the pastures and woods with comrades; 
and spending my evenings in lively 
company, playing chess, cards, or, for 
a few years in the summer, joining a 
cooking club which met weekly in 
the thick woods far from houses, and 
got up a fine supper of chicken and 
coffee, with a dessert of sponge cake ; 
which one of our number, afterwards 
Capt. John Sanborn Godfrey, of Gen- 
eral Hooker's staff in the Civil War, 
had the secret of preparing to perfec- 
tion. 

This entertainment had begun with 



FRANK B. SANBORN. 



33 



my schoolmates, William Healey and 
Charles Brown, and two or three stu- 
dents of the Rockingham Academy, 
Cavender of St. Louis, Yanderveer of 
New York, and another, but was then 
transferred to an unfrequented pine 
wood, near the boundaries of Exeter, 
Hampton and Hampton Falls, and 
included two Tiltons and other school- 
mates on that part of the Exeter road. 
After I left home to enter college the 
Exeter congressman, Oilman Mars- 
ton, afterwards a general in the war, 
and some others from Exeter were 
admitted to the mysteries, but I never 
met with them later than 1850, I 
think. 

A more exacting literary society 
had been established about 1848 in 
the upper hall of the schoolhouse 
where I had been a pupil, under the 
name of the "Anti-Tobacco Society," 
at the instance, I suppose, of the good 
minister of the Unitarian parish. We 
held debates, and soon established a 
MS. monthly journal, Star of Social 
Reform, which received contributions, 
supposed to be anonymous, from the 
members, male or female, and these 
were read at the monthly meetings. 
I early became a contributor, both in 
prose and verse, and in the summer 
of 1849 wrote a burlesque on the 
poem of " Festus," then much read 
in New England, in mild ridicule of 
the English author, Philip Bailey. 
The following winter the editor of the 
Star (now Mrs. S. H. Folsom of 
Winchester, Mass.), visiting her 
friend, Miss Ariana Smith Walker 
at Peterborough, showed her the 
"Festus" verses and some others, 
which she was good enough to like, 
and sent them to her dearest friend, 
Miss Ednah Eittlehale of Boston, the 

late Mrs. E. D. Cheney, with this note: 
3 



March 30. 1850. I don't know that I should 
have written you today if I had not wanted to 
send you the enclosed. It purports to be a 
newly discovered scene from "Festus," and is 
written by a person who does not altogether 
like the book, as you will see from the last 
part, especially. I want you to read it first, and 
then read the little note which will tell you 
about the author, /think it is capital; tell me 
how it strikes you. Please return it to me in 
your next. A. S. W. 

A few weeks later, April 26, she 
added : 

I send you herewith some poetry of Frank S., 
the author of the new scene from "Festus.'' 
The little ballad, is, I think, very pretty. He 
called it " Night Thoughts," but I like "The 
Taper " better, — do not you? And now I will 
tell you that he is a Hampton Falls boy, and 
that his name is Sanborne. I will send you all 
I can of his writing, and I want you to write a 
criticism upon the " Festus," etc., for the Star, 
a paper written by the young people at H. Falls. 
They shan't know who writes it ; but won't you 
sometime send me a sort of laughing notice of 
this " new Poet"? I want 3 t ou to, very much. 
Do you not get a pretty picture of the maid 
" who her needle plies," etc.? It reminded me 
of your " Gretchen." 

The ballad was the subject, after- 
wards, of a commendatory notice in 
the Star by A. S. W. which pleased 
the young poet, and led him to antici- 
pate the arrival of the critic; who also 
had some curiosity to see the youth 
about whom her friend had told her 
many things. When they first saw 
each other in the small church at 
Hampton Falls, she was sitting be- 
side her friend in the pew, and I was 
opposite, facing them, but only 30 feet 
away, so that our eyes met. She 
wrote on her folding fan, with a pin, 
" I don't dare look at Frank S.; he- 
has a poetic face." In her next let- 
ter to Ednah she said (July 22, 1850): 

I have seen F. S., the young poet, — a face 
like the early portrait of Raphael, only Frank's 
eyes and hair are very dark. I don't care, now 
I have seen him, to speak or meet with him. 
[In fact two days after he called on her and was 
welcome.] When we began to talk earnestly I 



34 



FRANK B. SANBORN. 




Birthplace of Georg 

■ everytmng else in my surprise and pleas- 
ure. I was astonished and delighted. There 

charm about everything he said, bd 
he has thought more wholly for himself than 

any one I ever met. ... In bonks, too, I 
teas astonished at his preferences, ft seemed 
strange thai -hould be the favorite poet 

of an uncultivated, I should say, self-cultivated 
boy; but so it is, and he talked of him and of 
the poems as 1 never heard any one talk, after 
his own fashion. ... He stayed until n, 
and yet I was neither weary nor sleepy, rathei 
refreshed and invigorated. 

The "laughing notice " of the Fes- 
tus scenes, obligingly written by Miss 
Littlehale. and sent to the editor of 
the Star, was this, followed by Miss 
Walker's comment on the ballad: 

The following not nt effusions we 

the liberty of quoting foi tin bi aefit of the 

ers of the Star. This first, a very brief 

■ on the London Enquirei I from a 

notice of "The Supplementary Scene to 

tus," which appiai.d in the [uly (1849) num- 

• the Slat the second " Nik'ht Thoughts," 

from a source less foreign. 



The New Scene or Fes tus. 

Tin- burlesque is capital; the similes are 
some of them so like " FestUS " one could easi- 
ly cheat another into the reality of certain 

Who this young devotee of St. Crispin 
is, we cannot divine. The lines show an admi- 
rable tact at verse making; we hope t" 
something which has the writer's soul in it, 
too. So promising a genius should be cultivated, 
not spoiled. 

I have elsewhere spoken of this love- 
ly vision of youth and spiritual grace 
first fairly seen by me in the Hamp- 
ton Falls church, July 20, 1850. She 
was the daughter of James Walker of 
Peterborough, a first cousin of Presi- 
dent Walker of Harvard College, and 
her mother, Sarah Smith, was the 
favorite niece of Judge Smith of Exe- 
ter. She had died in 1841, and Mr. 
Walker had remarried a daughter of 
Rev. Jacob Abbot of Hampton Falls. 
A lima, named for Judge Smith's 



FRANK B. SANBORN. 



35 



daughter, was born in the Carter 
house on the steep Peterborough hill- 
side, overlooking the river Contoocook 
from the northeast, and commanding, 
as all the hills thereabout do, a noble 
prospect of Monadnock. Her brother, 
George Walker, afterwards bank 
commissioner of Massachusetts and 
consul-general of the United States 
at Paris, was born five years earlier 
in the same house, and the brother 
and sister tripped down this hill in 
early childhood, near the mansion of 
their uncle, Samuel Smith, the judge's 
manufacturing brother, to attend the 
private school of Miss Abbot, now 
Mrs. Horatio Wood of Lowell, whose 
younger sister James Walker married 
in 1844. Her uncle, Rev. Dr. Abiel 
Abbot, pastor at Peterborough, had 
earlier in his ministry, at Coventry in 
Connecticut, persuaded Jared Sparks, 
the future historian, then a carpenter 
in Mr. Abbot's parish, to go to the 
Phillips Acadeni}' at Exeter in 1809. 
Mr. Abbot going to make a visit to 
his brother, the successor of President 
Langdon in the Hampton Falls pul- 
pit, slung the young man's box un- 
der his parson's chaise, while Sparks 
himself walked all the way to Exeter; 
whither his box preceded him, to the 
care of Dr. Benjamin Abbot (a cousin 
of the Hampton Falls pastor), then 
Principal of the famous Academy. It 
was this intermarriage between the 
Abbot and Walker families that led, 
as above mentioned, to my first ac- 
quaintance with Anna Walker. Her 
stepmother had a sister, Mrs. Cram, 
married in their father's old parish, 
and living next door to the old house 
then occupied by Mrs. Joseph San- 
born, my uncle's widow, with her 
two children, who were cousins of 
Mrs. Cram's children. Indeed the 



two houses once had belonged to 
the Cram family, with only a garden 
between them; the later built of the 
two being more than a hundred years 
old, and soon to give place to a new 
house, in which many of my inter- 
views with Miss Walker were after- 
wards held. But the old house, in its 
large parlor, was the memorable 
scene of our first interview, briefly 
described above by Anna herself. In 
a fuller entry in her journal she said : 

F. stayed until n and yet I was neither weary 
nor sleepy, but rather refreshed and invigora- 
ted. He excused himself for sta5 r ing so late, 
but said the time had passed rapidly. C. seemed 
very much surprised that he had spoken so 
freely to a stranger ; I think he himself will 
wonder at it. The conversation covered so 
many subjects that I could not help laughing 
on looking back upon it; he might have discov- 
ered the great fault of my mind, a want of 
method in my thoughts, as clearly as I saw his 
to be a want of hope. But talking with a new per- 
son is to me like going for the first time into a 
gallery of pictures. We wander from one paint- 
ing to another, wishing to see all, lest some- 
thing finest should escape us, and in truth see- 
ing no one perfectly and appreciatingly. Only 
after many visits and long familiarity can we 
learn which are really the best, most suggestive 
and most full of meaning ; and then it is before 
two or three that one passes the hours. So we 
wander at first from one topic of conversation to 
another, until we find which are those reaching 
farthest and deepest, and then it is these of 
which we talk most. My interest in Frank S. 
is peculiar; it is his intellectual and spiritual 
nature, and not himself that I feel so much 
drawn to. I can't say it rightly in words, but I 
never was so strongly interested in one where 
the feeling was so little personal. 

This was by no means my own 
case. I had the strongest personal 
interest in this young lady, whose 
life had been so unlike my own, but 
who had reached in many points 
the same conclusions, literary, social 
and religious, which were my own, 
so far as a youth of less than nineteen 
can be said to have reached conclu- 
sions. We met again and again, and 



36 



FRANK />'. SANBORN. 








discussed not only Shelley, but Plato 
and Emerson, of whom we were both 
eager readers. She had received from 
her father the winter before Emer- 
son's " Representative Men," just 
after she had been reading Plato with 
Ednah I.ittlehalc, and she was also 
familiar with several of the other 
characters in that volume, — her stud- 
ies in German having advanced fur- 
ther than mine. Two years earlier she 
had read Emerson's first book, " Na- 
ture," more than once, and at the 
age of [8 thus wrote of it to Ednah : 

April i, 1848. [ am glad you hav< nail 
tun-.'' [t has long been "in- of my books, it 
lie- .a this moment on my little table, ami m-i_ 
dom does a day pass without my finding th< n 
thing that chimes with tin day's thought. 
Bmerson always gives me a feeling >>i quiet, 



simple strength. I go to him, therefore, when 
I am weak ami feeble,- not when I am full 
of unrest ami disquiet. My soul is at times 
the echo of his; like the echo, however, it can 
only give back a single word. I how in quiet 
1 his grander thought; but, like him, I do 
not therefore yield my own. The light of his 
spirit does notdazzle my ey< - so that all seems 

dark elsewhere; on the contrary, the world 
around me, reflecting hack that rail, 
smiles in a new-horn glory. 1 love the whol< 
earth more, that 1 know him more truly. 

( )f the crayon by Morse, here en- 
graved, which remained in Boston 

some- weeks after it was finished, that 
winter of [847 -'48, she thus wrote to 
Ednah, February <>, [8 i s : 

Walkel is veiv enthusiastic about 

Morse and the picture. "It is almost too fine," 

I rom uliat In- told me I should think it 

decidedly the finest of Worst s pictures. Tell 
him I could not have been more glad if the pic- 




F B. SANBORN IN COLLEGE, 1853 



38 



FRANK' />'. SANBORN. 



ture bad been my own. Greenough, the sculp- 

tOT, Bays it 18 the finest crayon ever dime in 
Boston. Shall I tell you what I felt when I 

read George 's letter?- a deep regret that I was 

not beautiful. I could wish myself lovely/ for 
Morse - sake, foi the sake of his fame; because 

then the piciure would have been liner. 

No one ever found this portrait 
other than beautiful. When I first 
saw her, two years after Alpheus 
Morse had finished it, her expression 
had changed from the serene, saintly 
look which Morse depicted, to one of 
more vivacity and gayety, which in 
her periods of comparative health was 
her natural expression, and which 
made her even more charming than 
in the earlier portrait. She had just 
reached [8 when it was drawn, and it 
was made for her brother, herself re- 
taining only a daguerre from it. 

Our second evening was that of 
August i, and this is the record of it 
in her journal : 

Last night F. S. was here again. We had 
been wishing he would come but did not expect 
him. He was in a fine mood, but one or two 
things I regret in the evening's talk. He had 
spoken of many things earnestly, and at last 
he mentioned James Richardson's proposal that 
he should enter into the ministry. We all 
laughed. I wanted to say something of his 
future life; but I seemed to have no right. He 
said "That is the last thing I should choie." 
"No," said I, with decision, "preaching is not 
your mission." I felt as if I must go on, but I 
n strained myself and was silent. He must 
have thought we ridiculed the idea of his becom- 
ing a minister, because we thought him un- 
equal tO the work. I did not feel this so fully 
then as I did after he was gone; but it hurts me 

to have so repulsed him, for I think be wished 

us to say something more — to talk with him of 
himself and of his future. O golden opportu- 
nity! I feai it is Inst and will not come again. 

We talked of many things — I more of 
pie than formerly. His mind is analytic, the in- 
tellect predominating and governing the heart ; 

feelings do not often get the mastery. He is 
calm and searching, with a very keen insight 
into the merits or demerits of a style. This is 
characteristic of his mind. He is unsparingly 
just to his own thought. He is not at all a 
dreamer; or, if he is ever so, his dreams are not 



enervating. He is vigorous, living, strong. 
Calmness of thought is a large element of his 
nature; it extends to the feelings as well as the 
intellect. Yet there is fire under the ice, and I 
imagine if it should be reached it would flame 
forth with gnat power and intensity. 

\\V talked of Plato and Herbert and Shelley, 
and many others. He says it is not the thought 
of "Alastor" that makes it his favorite, but the 
versification. I do not think now that he is 
wanting in severity. He went away after eleven. 
"I have stayed even laterthan the other night, 
said he, "quite too late." "Oh, no, not at all,'' 
said I. I think he liked to come again. It 
may seem vain to say so, but I suspect he had 
seldom talked with any one exactly as he did 
with us tonight. C. is the only person here 
who would care to talk with him on such Bub 
jects; and her gentle modesty would not allow 
her to sit deliberately down to draw any one 
out as I have done with Frank. C. said she did 
not know he could talk so finely. I belief that 
to him it was a relief. He has a rich nature, 
and yet my interest in him has little to do with 
feelings, less so than I could have supposed 
possible for vie. 

Ah, how little do we at such times 
know ourselves ! The next few weeks 
showed that nothing so interested her 
feelings as the fortunes of this youth. 

As I wrote the above, Mrs. Cram asked me 
why, if I felt that F. had misunderstood what I 
said of his becoming a minister, I did not write 
him a note, and tell him what I then wished BO 
much to say. She urged my doing so, and at 
last I wrote the following, which I showed to 
her, and which she advised my sending: 

NOTE. 

win n you spoke last night of Mr. R.'s prop- 
osition that you should enter the ministry, I have 

thought that what I replied might and must 
have given you a wrong impression. When I 
said with decision that 1 did not think preach- 
ing your mission, it was not because I fe.m d 
you would fail in that or, in anything for which 
yon should heartily strive; but because it s. 
to mi .is if no one should take such a mission 
upon himself unless he feels a decided call, and 
is s, nsible of a peculiar fitness. 

Your work in life seems to me more clearly 
pointed out than that of most men; it conn B 
uudei that last head in " Representative Men;" 
we need yon is a writer. I know how much 
of struggle and even of suffering such a life 
must contain, but l'lato says, "When one is 
attempting noble things it is surely noble also 
to suffer whatever it may befall him to suffer. " 

I feel that there is that within you which 
cannot rightfully be hidden; and your si ; , 
seems to me sure, if you will but bend your 
whole energies to this end. I wish I were wise 
enough to suggest something more than the goal 
to be reached; but I am sure you will have 



FRANK B. SANBORN. 



39 



other and more efficient friends who will give 
you the aid of experience. 

Perhaps you will think I presume upon a 
short acquaintance to say all this; but it is often 
given to us "to foresee the destiny of another 
more clearly than that other can," and it seems 
to me only truth to strive "by heroic encour- 
agements to hold him to his task." Will you 
pardon my boldness? I give you God-speed. 
Your friend, 

Anna W. 

The next day the journal goes on: 

We rode to the Hill (the post-office) and left 
Frank's note with his little brother, Josey, at 
school. I felt sorry I had sent it the moment it 
was fairly gone, and if I could have recalled it 
I certainly should. It contained little of my 
thought, and would do harm if not received 
earnestly. It is difficult to do good. I hope I 
shall see and talk with F. before I go to Glou- 
cester. 

August 3. This evening, as I lay wearily on 
the sofa, for I had been sick all day, Charles 
Healey came in, and immediately afterward, 
Frank. I felt not at ease, for we could say 
nothing of what was in both our thoughts 
often and often, I am sure. I seemed stupid, 
talked, but said nothing. Frank was gay — he 
is seldom that; C. said when he had gone, 
"Anna, I saw your influence in all F. said to- 
night, — he was happy." I don't know what to 
think- Why did he come and why has he said 
nothing about my note? It requires speed3' 
answer. 

August 6, Tuesday. I felt all day as if some- 
thing was going to happtn to me, and in the 
afternoon F. C. brought me a letter from 
Frank. It was calm, manly, kind, sincere, ear- 
nest ; not warm — apart from feeling. I felt it very 
much. A note which came with it, and which 
contained little in words, gave me an impres- 
sion of feeling w T hich the letter did not. A son- 
net F. sent me also, which I like. He added 
some marginal notes which rather made a jest 
of it; but I think the sonnet was written ear- 
nestly, and the notes were an afterthought 
to conceal that earnestness. How deeply, how 
strongly I am interested in Frank! I feel as if 
I must help him. He has hardly been out of 
my thoughts an hour since I wrote the note. 
And now his frankness gives a new tone to my 
thought ; for I feel as if I might perhaps do 
something for him. 

THE SONNET. 

Our life — a casket of mean outward show, 
Hides countless treasures, jewels rich and rare, 
Whose splendid worth, whose beauty, won- 
drous fair, 
Only the favored few may see and know 
On whom the partial Gods in love bestow, 
To ope the stubborn lid, the silver key; 



And such methinks, have they bestowed on 

Thee. 
Or shall I say? o'er all things base and low 

Thou hast the blessed power of alchemy, 
Changing their dross and baseness into gold; 

And in all vulgar things on earth that be. 
Awakening beauty, as the Greek of old 

Wrought vase and urn of matchless symmetry 
From the downtrodden and unvalued mould. 
August 6, 1850. F. B. S. 

Wednesday, Aug. 7. I went to the Sewing 
Circle on Munt Hill. I had three reasons for 
going — to be with Cate, to sit under the green 
trees once again, and to see Frank, who I felt 
sure would be there. I had a beautiful but 
wearisome afternoon. I liked to sit under the 
green arches of the oaks and maples, and to 
watch the play of faces, and read through them 
in the souls of those around me. Cate is the 
best, and most beautiful and worthy to be 
loved; and next to her I was drawn to Helen 
Sanborn. She is cold and self-centered, but she 
interests me. I want to know what all that 
coldness covers and conceals. Frank came; he 
greeted me last, and then almost distantly — 
certainly coldly. He was gay and witty, and we 
had a little talk together, sitting after tea in the 
doorwa} 7 . Miss (Nancy) Sanborn's house* is 
prettily located, but there is something really 
mournful in such a lonely life as hers. Heaven 
save me from so vacant, so desolate a life as 
that of most unmarried women! 

We had a pleasant ride home, and I thought 
F. might come up in the evening. If he does 
not I shall probably not see him again. I hope 
he will come. 

August 8. He did come up last night, and we 
talked very earnestly and freely together. I 
think I never spoke with more openness to 
any one; we forgot we were Frank and Anna, 
and talked as one immortal soul to another. 

The conversation began by Cate's showing 
him my Analyses. I sat in a low chair at C.'s 
feet, and watched his face while he read. It was 
steady; I could not read it, and I admired his 
composure, because I do not think it arose from 
a want of feeling. He said, when he had fin- 
ished, that he should not like to say whose the 
first analysis was; it might apply in parts to 
many ; and then turned to his own, and began to 
talk of it; not easily, but with difficulty and re- 
serve. . I gave him a pencil and asked him to 
mark what he thought untrue. He made three or 
four marks, and explained why he did so; but 
not for some time did he say that it was himself 
of whom he spoke. He said I overrated him; 
he was quick but confused, and he complained 
of a want of method, strictness and steadiness 



*The old Sanborn house near Munt Hill, in Chap- 
ter 1. 



40 



FRANK A'. SANBORN 



upom , in In- intellectual nature. I thought 
these rathei faults of habit than of nature; few 
minds left s<> wholly to themselves, with bo 
little opportunity, would have been oth< i than 
<lt sul: 

To be overestimated, 01 to feel himself so, is 
extremely painful to Prank, and be constantly 
red to it. "I shall not, I think , be injured 
by your p raises," said he at one time; "I have 
a mirror always near me which shows me to 
myseli as I really am." In referring to that 
part of the analysis where I spoke of his 
being less self-dependent than he thought 
himself, he said, "Yes, I want some superior 
friend to whom I can go at all times, and who 
will never fail me." Who of us does not need 
such a friend' I thought of Bdnafa gratefully. 

In talking of the way- and means of life 
before him, I told him how deeply I felt my own 
want of practical ability; it seemed idle to 
suggest only the goal to be reached, and to 
say nothing of the paths leading thereto. 
id I. with real feeling, "I have 
not helped you." "I am afraid," he said, "that 
you suffer a- I do, from a want of self-confi- 
dence." Cate urged me to greater freedom, foi 
I was embarrassed, and I said in reply, "I wish 
I were wise." "I hope it is not my wisdom 
that restrains you," he said with great gentle- 
ness, "a little child might lead me." The tone 
of feeling touched me, I looked at him quietly, 
and talked more clearly of school and college, 
and all the possibilities which the future held 
out to him, and the probabilities. 

I told him it was the discipline he needed 
most,— not so much the books he would study 
as the power he would obtain over his own 
thoughts, and the opportunities which such 
a life would open to him. He then -poke of 
himself, and -aid that he feared a sedentary 
life would " only hasten what would come soon 
enough of itself." And for the first time I 
observi <1 the hollow chest and the bright color 
which indicate consumptive tendencies in him. 
Health must not be sacrificed; his work in life 
must not be hindered by bodily weakness; this 
is an important consideration. lie then spoke 
of Mr. R.'s proposition, and, finally, all solved 
itself in the question, " What i- really my work 
in lid 

I think," -aid I in reply. " that there might 
in a person wise enough to decide for you." 

I think -o. too,' -lid he quickly, "and I 
wi-h that person would decide," — "or those 

persons," he added, aftei ■> moment. 1 thought 

Bible he might mean Cate or myself by 

"that person"; but 1 did not f< • •; capab 
choosing for him, even if he had thought of me 

when he -poke, and of that I greatly doubt. 
So no reply was made, but the final result 
-eemed to be, that if his health would allow 



private lessons or school would be the best 

thing open to him. 

In looking again at the Analysis,*— I told him 
that it would not bear severe intellectual crit- 
icism; it must necessarily have many and great 
fault-. He said, " It is almost perfect, 1 
that you stood at too high a point of view, 
-o that some defects were concealed,"— and 
-eemt d surprised that he should have laid him 
self open so far in BO short a time. But "I see 
that I must have done BO, unless you have 
much clearer eyes than most people." "Not 
that," said I, "but I have a habit of studying 
BOUls; persons are more to me than to most. 
I read in them as you read in books. 1 have 
-ecu in you tonight some new traits of charac- 
ter." He then a-ked me to add them to the 
analysis; but I would not promise to do BO. 
" I hope," he said, " that you are not going to 
conceal anything. Talk to me as if I were a 
chair or a table; I can bear any truth, — do not 
fear to wound me." " I am not afraid t 
e with you," said I. 

'I'he conversation turned upon many things 
which I cannot w lite here, — upon pride, upon 
faith in a future life, etc. It was not till after 
midnight that he said he must go; and then it 
was evidently only because he felt he ought; 
the conversation held him. " When," he asked, 
"-hall you be in Hampton Palls again? 

Perhaps in one year, perhaps not foi Bev< 
said I. "Then it is doubtful when we shall 
see one another again. I shall not be likely to 
meet you anywhere else." id I. 

" when I see you next, your destiny will prob 
ably be decided." "I will promise you," he 
said, " that my choice shall be made as quickly 
as possible." 

I told him I hoped I should hear of it when 
he did so. He said he might not be in Hamp 
ton Palls at that time, and seemed, I half 
thought, to wish me to ask him to tell me him- 
self of his decision; but I hesitated to do so, 
and so said nothing. "And so," he said again, 
a- lu bad* me good-by, "it is uncertain 

whethei we shall see each other again for 



•The close "i tin- i- as follows " Has many 
aspirations mi unsatisfied. Mill seeking, 
seeking, groping in the dark. He wants a.defintU 
end lor which to strive heattily; then hi- au 
would be soke, Much executive power, exi 
better than he plana. 

" I.ove- the beautiful in all things. He has much 

originality; his thoughts and tastes are peculiarly 
lu- own is impatient of wrong, and almost equally 
r. [a gentle in Bplteofa certain cold- 
ness about him; h.i- strong passions In -piteof 
in- .•.<.:' calmness of intellect ami affection. 

A nature not likely to End rest, Struggle i- its 
native element; wants a lUady aim. »ui I work. 

standing still is impossible but he must have a 

K><^i! motive lot which to strive. 

Many contradictions in this analysis, but not 
than there are in the character itself" 



FRANK B. SANBORN. 



4i 



years. Well, — I shall always remember that 
there is one person in the world who thinks 
more highly of me than I do of myself." We 
shook hands, and he went away. 

Intellectually, or by a certain fitness between 
us, I seemed to draw near to him, and I think 
he was sorry that our acquaintance should have 
been so transient, and should have terminated 
so suddenly. It seems strange to think of 
now, and not quite real to me; but I feel it has 
been of great service to me, however little 
I have done to help him. I have never seen 
any one like Frank. It is good to have a new 
interest in life, and in him I shall always feel 
strongly interested. I believe the journal of 
this evening is very poor; it gives not the least 
idea of what I consider as almost the most sin- 
gular conversation in my life, — and the end of 
a strange experience. 

Ah, no ! it was the beginning of 
that experience of which Dante wrote 
in his Vita Nuova, — " Behold a Spirit 
cometh mightier than thon, who shall 
rule over thee." This gentle maiden 
had not been averse to L,ove, but now 
he came in his full armor. The tell- 
tale journal goes on: 

When he was gone I felt so full of regret that 
I had not spoken more wisely to him that I 
covered my face with my hands and let the 
warm tears flow fast, — but it was only for a 
moment. I was excited as I seldom am; felt 
strong and free, and as I looked out of the 
window had an inclination to throw myself 
down on the cool gTass below. The girls would 
not let me talk; they went to their rooms, — 
but I lay waking all the night through. How 
I wished for some divining power to give me 
a knowledge of Frank's thoughts ! Had I 
helped him ? was this meeting of ours to have 
any influence upon his life? and if so, would it 
work for good or evil ? was this the beginning 
or the end of some new life? Lastly, how had 
he thought of met finely and highly, or had I 
seemed poor and bold? Upon his thought of 
me all the power of this evening to help him 
must depend; and I felt doubtful what it had 
been. Are we really to see each other no 
more? and is this to end our acquaintance? 
Have I been forbearing enough ? Should I not 
have waited to be sought, and not have gone 
out to meet him? But my motive was pure 
and disinterested; does he know that? Of 
course he could not seek me. There certainly 
was feeling in him tonight, — I saw it in his face. 
It is true then that he loves X.? These and a 
thousand other questions I went on asking, 



while the night wore away. I rose ill and fee- 
ble, and all day have suffered much; though 
not more than I expected last night. I have 
written F. a note, the principal object of which 
is to ask him to tell me himself when his deci- 
sion is made as to his future life. I shall send 
it with the Analysis. Mrs. C. has seen and 
approved of it, and I trust to her judgment. 
There is much more feeling in it than in his 
letter; but it seemed to me not to touch upon 
sentiment. Beside, F. is not vain, — the strange 
boy ! 

There was no occasion to doubt 
how I had received all this inspira- 
tion and encouragement to a more 
active life. It had been taken exactly 
as it was meant, and no thought un- 
worthy of the most ideal friendship 
occurred to me. But the arrow of 
Love had wounded me also, and I 
was not so unconscious of it as Anna 
was. We continued to correspond, 
and I w y ent on my projected trip to 
the White Mountains early in Sep- 
tember, with my head and heart both 
enlisted in her service. In one of my 
letters I sent her these lines, which, 
after the avowal of my love in Novem- 
ber, I completed to a sonnet, by the 
lines of the final couplet: 

SONNET II. 

As calmest waters mirror Heaven the best, 
So best befit remembrances of Thee 
Calm, holy hours, from earthly passion free, 
Sweet twilight musing, — Sabbaths in the breast: 
No stooping thought, nor any groveling care 
The sacred whiteness of that place shall stain, 
Where, far from heartless joys and rites pro- 
fane, 
Memory has reared to Thee an altar fair; 

Yet frequent visitors shall kiss the shrine, 
And ever keep its vestal lamp alight, — 
All noble thoughts, all dreams divinely bright, 
That waken or delight this soul of mine. 

So Love, meek pilgrim ! his young vows did pay, 
With glowing eyes that must his lips gainsay. 

In the meanwhile she had gone to 
spend the rest of August with her 
dear Ednah at Gloucester by the sea- 
side, and from there, two weeks after 



42 



FRANK B. SANBORN. 



this parting at Hampton Falls, she 
wrote to her friend Cate what I may 
call 

Al>\ in TO A VOUNG STUDENT. 

( I U ENTY lo KI'.II l : 

Gloi cester, August 22nd, 1850. 

. . . And now, dear, — I want to talk to you 
about Frank, — about whose future I have had 
much anxious thought. There seem to me to 
be many objections to both the plans we men- 
tioned in that evening's conversation, which were 
not as clear to me then as now, — I mean the go- 
ing to college or the studying with Mr. Richard- 
son.* Amid the sedentary habits of Cambridge 
I really fear for Frank's health, — so many have 
I seen sink under them who were more vigorous 
than he; and so often have I mourned over 
earthly promise lost, — ruthlessly thrown away, — 
amid influences like those, where everything 
was sacrificed to the intellect With all the ex- 
ternal struggles which Frank would be forced to 
undergo in addition to these, I fee.1 as if it were 
hardly possible for him to go through a course 
at Cambridge without impaired health, — and, as 
a necessarv consequence, inevitable, diminished 
powers; for let no one dream that he can break 
one of God's laws without the wliole being suffer- 
ing therefrom. Frank's health wustbe preserved; 
his work in life must not be hindered or marred 
by bodily weakness. He owes it to the good 
God who has given so much to him not to "lay 
waste his powers," — that he may remain here 
with us, and help u> to live, as long as he can. 
Is it not so, darling ? 

With regard to Mr. Richardson, even if that 
should be open to Frank, I doubt if it would 
really bt for the best. James Richardson's faults 
of mind are so exactly those which F. complains 
of in himself, that I fear he would not obtain 
from him that discipline which he most needs. 
There is not enough reality about J. R. to satisfy 
the wants of a true and strong nature; not that 
I fear contagion, for Frank has more power of 
self-preservation than any prison I ever met, 
and he might as well (east- to be, as cease to be 
true; but his teacher should be a man of stiict 
and accurate mind, with an element even of 
intellectual severity in it, — with a soul open to 



fames Richardson, ■ classmate ofThoreau 
at Harvard, was then settled at Haverhill, Mass 
ami, preaching at Hampton Halls the preceding 
April had met !•'. B. 8. and urged bim to go to col- 
lege, — promising to aid him. if needful. Nothing 
had come "! this, or was likely to. Prof. J. G. Hoyt 
was the teacher of Creek and mathematics at Hit- 
ter Academy, — an active anti-slavery man also. 



enthusiasm but not possessed by it, — and ready 
and willing to impart its wealth to others. Such 
a man Mr. R. is not, and I do not say this from 
my own knowledge, merely, but from the better 
knowledge of those who have known him long 
and intimately. 

And now, after all this, dear, I want to make 
a new suggestion to Frank,— which is that in- 
stead of either of these things he should remain 
at Hampton Falls, and take private lessons of 
Mr Hoyt at Exeter, during this winter at least. 
Going into F.xeter once or twice a week would 
be easy for him, and all that would be needful 
in his case. And from all I hear of Mr. Hoyt 
he is admirably fitted to be Frank's guide. Ed- 
nah, who knows him, says he is just the person, 
she should think, to do F. good ; I only judge of 
him through others. If I were Frank I should 
go to Mr. H. and tell him just how it was with 
me, — that it was the discipline of education that 
I wanted, and not to be fitted for any particular 
profession; and I should ask his advice as t.> 
the studies best to pursue. If Frank would do 
this, I do not fear for the result; if I am not 
mistaken in my opinion of Mr. H. at the end of 
the winter he would no longer stand in need of 
that friend who is awenough to choose for him 
his future course in life. 

I >oes not this seem to you the best and most 
possible present course for Frank ? It does 
seem so to me; and I have thought of this with 
far more anxiety and effort than I have bestowed 
even upon my own winter, and all that must de- 
pend thereon. Can I say more? or will you 
understand fully that this is my best judgment, — 
which can only pass for what it is worth ? though 
I would it were of a thousand times more value 
than it is. . After all, this can only be a 

suggestion, — for it is made without a full knowl- 
edge of facts, and there may be many objections 
known to Frank, of which I am wholly ignorant. 
I would only offer it as all that 1 have to give. 

Frank's course in life, as it lies clearly in my 
thought, seems to be this: To devote the next 
four or five years to as severe study (and I do not 
mean by study mere getting of lessons) as a 
strict obedience to the laws of health will allow; 
to take for thi> time intellectual discipline as the 

principal, though not the exclusive end and aim 

of life, — and for this purpose to make use of all 
and the best means in his power. At the end of 
those years he may work with his hands at any- 
thing he pleases; there is no labor which a 
noble soul cannot dignify. He shall make shoes 
"i be a farmer, or whatever else he finds easiest, 
— if he will give us his best thoughts through 
pen and paper, — if he does also his appointed 



FRANK B. SANBORN. 



43 



spiritual and intellectual work. He shall even 
settle down quietly in H. F. if so his choice lead 
him (for place will be little to him when he has 
obtained full possession of himself), — so that he 
do but let his light so shine before men that they 
may see his good works and give thanks to the 
Father therefor. I would not condemn him to 
the hard struggles of the merely literary man, 
even if his physical strength would allow ; for in 
this money-loving Yankee land want and suffer- 
ing are the sure accompaniments of such a life; 
but I would have him fitted to use to the full 
those powers of mind which God has given him 
for the benefit of others; and I would have this 
work of a writer the highest end and aim of life, 
— although other things may be the needful and 
even beautiful accessories. 

And now I wish you to show this part of my 
letter to Frank; and I should like him to con- 
sider it without any reference to its being my 
opinion (for I think it would have not more but 
less weight, perhaps, on that account), but sim- 
ply as a suggestion worthy of thought, while he 
is making his decision with regard to his future 
life, and the immediate steps to be taken therein. 
" If I were to proffer an earnest prayer to the 
gods for the greatest of earthly privileges," says 
Mr. Alcott in his Journal, "it should be for a 
severely candid friend." That, at least, I am and 
have been to Frank; and even should he think 
me inclined to force and intrude my opinions 
upon him, I will not selfishly shrink from doing 
what I think right, because I may thereby suffer 
the loss of his good opinion. I am very anxious 
that Frank should now and quickly have some 
intellectual guide and friend ; and such, I hope, 
Mr. H. might become to him. Hitherto he has 
stood alone, for he is strong and cheerful, — but 
now he wants a helping hand, though it do but 
touch him gently, so that he may feel himself a 
link in the great chain that binds humanity to- 
gether. For this he appears to me not yet to 
have felt quite clearly. He himself says " A 
little child might lead me", — but he cannot be 
led, — only guided, — and even that must be by 
his superior. 

I incline to think he has never learned much 
from any one soul ; for his life has been rather 
in thoughts than persons ; but all things, ani- 
mate and inanimate, have been his unconscious 
teachers; and should I seem to flatter if I said 
that, like his own Pilgrim, he has in him "some- 
thing of the universality of Nature herself ? " 
I think I do but use the expression with his own 
meaning. I have spoken to you dear, often, of 
the suffering of Frank's probable life, — but not 
from any feeble wish to hold him from it. He 



must go upward by the " steep but terrible way " 
— by the precipice — and not by the winding path, 
— and I say God speed. 

There is one other person in Exeter who would 
take Frank as a pupil, I have no doubt, — and 
that is Mr. Hitchcock.* In belles lettres he is 
far superior to Mr. Hoyt, and indeed to most 
men, — and I think he might gratify Frank's 
tastes more fully ; but I doubt if he has so strict 
and accurate a mind as Mr. Hoyt, or would 
prove so good a guide for F. I should like him 
to be Frank's friend, and not his teacher. 

I followed this very wise counsel, 
took lessons # in Greek of Mr. Hoyt 
for a year, and then entered Phillips 
Exeter Academy for seven months, 
and from that entered at Harvard a 
year in advance, — having read much 
Eatin before going to Exeter. The 
arrangement had the incidental ad- 
vantage, not foreseen by either of us, 
that I could receive my letters and 
parcels from Anna, and send my own 
without attracting too much notice 
from friends and relatives, — who were 
generally excluded from knowledge 
of the correspondence. 

I have sometimes thought that a 
young man of less vanity than F. B. S. 
might be excused for hoping that a 
lady, who evidently took so deep an 
interest in his character and future 
career, had at least a slight personal 
reason for so doing. But that w r ould 
have been unjust to this rare person- 
age, who certainly was the most un- 
selfish, altruistic and just of all women. 
The disclosure of love was truly as 
great a surprise to her three months 
after this as anything could have 
been ; but that it was not unwelcome 
the event proved. 



* Rev. Roswell Hitchcock was then pleaching at 
the old church in Exeter, but afterwards became 
the head of the Calviuistic Union Theological Sem- 
inary at New York. Anna's judgment of him was 
very just; what her observation had been I know 
not ; but once taking tea with him would have 
given her this perception, so remarkable was her 
insight. 



+4 



FRAA'R />. SAN/iORN. 



Soon after ray return from the 
White Mountains I made the arrange- 
ment with Prof. J. G. Hoyt of the 
Exeter Academy, by which I was to 
recite to him in Greek for a year be- 
fore entering regularly as a student in 
Exeter. 

My visits to his study were weekly, 
and this was the beginning of a friend- 
ship with a noble man, which contin- 
ued so long as he lived. Years 
afterward he wished rae to take a po- 
sition with him in the Washington 
University at St. Louis; as the late 



at Hampton Falls, she wrote me a 
letter early in November, asking my 
confidence in the matter. To con- 
vince her what the truth was, I con- 
fessed my ardent love for her. She 
received the avowal as it was meant, 
but in a spirit of self-denial, she de- 
ferred the acceptance for a time. The 
journal, as formerly, received her con- 
fession : 

I opened the note (November 21, 1S50) and 
read the first two or three lines, and covered my 
face with my hands. It seemed impossible to 
believe in the reality of what I saw. That 




Exeter Street in I 850. 



Amos Lawrence had offered me, a few 
years earlier, the head mastership of 
the Lawrence Academy in Kansas, 
which has become the State Univer- 
sity. For good reasons, I declined 
both offers. 

Miss Littlehale, whom I first met at 
Exeter in the spring of 1852, was in 
the autumn of 1850 seriously ill for a 
long time at her father's house, 44 
Bowdoin street, Boston ; and there 
Miss Walker visited her in October 
and November of that year. Misap- 
prehending some circumstances in my 
relations with her particular friends 



Frank could love me, — weak, feeble, unworthy 
as I am, — I had never even dreamed. When I 
could read the little note, i( wis so clear, so like 
Frank, that I could only thank Ciod that he loved 
me. Had he been near me then, — could not 
but have told him that I loved him. I, the 
lonely, felt myself no more alone; and life 
looked fair to me in this new radiance. 

So early and so bold an avowal fixed 
the fate of both ; they could never 
afterward be other than lovers, how- 
ever much the wisdom of the world 
pleaded against a relation closer than 
friendship. But the world must not at 
first know the footing upon which they 
stood ; even the father and brother 



FRANK B. SANBORN. 



45 



must imagine it a close friendship, 
such as her expansive nature was 
so apt to form, and so faithful to 
maintain. One family in Hampton 
Falls and one friend in Boston, Miss 
Littlehale, were to be cognizant of 
the truth ; and it was not clear, for 
years, to the self-sacrificing good 



ment of marriage, to be fulfilled 
when my college course should be 
ended, and my position in the world 
established. The announcement was 
made in 1853, following a recurrence 
of the mysterious illness from which 
she had suffered more or less since 
1846, and of which she died in 1854. 




George Walker in Paris, 1886. 



sense of the maiden, what her ulti- 
mate answer to the world might 
be. Hence misunderstandings and 
remonstrances from those who saw 
more clearly than the young lovers 
could, how many outward obstacles 
opposed themselves to this union of 
hearts. But the union remained un- 
broken, and could at last be pro- 
claimed to the world as an engage- 



In the intervening four years since 
our first meeting, great happiness had 
been ours, and also much suffering, 
from the uncertainties of life and the 
divided allegiance which she owed to 
her family and to her lover. Finally 
this source of unhappiness was re- 
moved, and it was seen by all that her 
choice was to be accepted, whatever 
the results might be. Her brother 



4 6 



FRANK B. SANBORN. 



George was her confidant after a 
little. His relation to his sister after 
the death of their mother, and in the 
feeble health and engrossing occupa- 
tions of their father, was peculiarly 
admirable. When she found herself 
more closely bound to another, this 
new tie was not allowed to weaken 
the fraternal affection. He adopted 
the youth who had so unexpectedly 
become dear, as a younger brother ; 
and his delicate generosity in circum- 
stances which often produce estrange- 
ment was never forgotten. In pub- 
lic life he was the same consider- 
ate and high-minded gentleman ; not 
regardless of the advantages which 
social position and moderate wealth 
give, but ever ready to share his 
blessings, instead of engrossing all 
within reach to himself and his circle. 
Without the commanding talents or 
decisive character which make men 
illustrious, and secure unchanging 
fortune, he had, as Channing said of 
Henry Thoreau, " what is better, — 
the old Roman belief that there is 
more in this life than applause and 
the best seat at the dinner table, — 
to have moments to spare to thought 
and imagination, and to those who 
need you." 

Vet this affectionate brother seemed 
at first to stand like a lion in the path 
that was to bring two lovers together. 
A month after the declaration, Anna 
wrote to Ednah Littlehale, her dear- 
est friend 

Aii'l vet, my Ednah, even you are not d 

to me than Frank is. I cannot hear to tell 

< reorge "i .ill this until F, has a< hieved t < >r him- 

o much thai it will not seem mere madness 

I think I i annot speak of t 

him until this is bo. I cannol more 

than myself to the pain thai would follow; and 

■ m say it would not be tight to keep this a 

uld not ask a longer waiting of 



Frank; how shall it be with us? Will you help 
me as much as human love can aid, and tell me 
what you think of all this? I, your child, ask it 
ol von as I would have clone of my mother, were 
she living and near me; will you refuse me? 
" Will F. be able to like you *' ? Yes, yes, yes, — 
as much as I do; he would love you, — you 
would wit : only you must see each other first 
under favorable circumstances, — not in Town, 
not ceremoniously. I send you inclosed I 's 
letters: I wish you to return them at once, and 
write to me of them some time, frankly, — just 
what you feel, — this, dearest, at your leisure. 
. . . Believe me that I do not muse and 
dream; the only time when I am ever guilty of 
tlii— is in the very early morning, — when I have 
waked sometimes from dreams of F., and, half 
waking, half sleeping, have fancied what we 
should say to one another when we met. 

And to show that I was no better in 
that respect, she enclosed to Ednah 
my last sonnet : 

SONNET III. 

Being absent yel thou ait not wholly gone, 

For thou hast stamped thine image on the 
world ; 
It shines befoie me in the blushing dawn, 

And sunset clouds about its grace are curled ; 
And thou hast burthened every summer breeze 

With the remembered music of thy voice, 
Sweeter than linnet's song in garden trees, 

And making wearisome all other joys. 
Sleep vainly strives to bar thee from his hall. — 

Thou win'st light entrance in a dream's dis- 
guise, 
And there with gentlest sway thou rulest all 

1 1 is gliding visions and <|iiick fantasies ; 
The busy i\a\ is thine; the quiet night 

Sleeps in thy radiant e, as the skies in light. 

"These I thought you would like," 
she adds at the foot ; " tell me if you 
do." The topic was never far from 
her mind, wherever she might be. 
At Westford, visiting her stepmoth- 
er's sister, the aunt of her Hampton 
Falls confidante, she wrote to Ednah 
i J an. jo, 1S51) : 

One thin lis me, that I am very glad 

of. She says that last summer Frank gave all 
the letters he had had from me to his 
Sarah ' hei t" 1 cad them, and tell him 



FRANK B. SANBORN. 



47 



if there was any peculiar feeling in them ? She 
did so, and said to him that she did not think 
there was. Then he told her the way he was 
going, — that he felt he had no power to resist, — 
that he saw himself daily passing into deeper 
waters ; that every day he loved me more and 
more, and could not go back a single step. And 
he asked her to read the letters again, with refer- 
ence to his feeling for me, and tell him what she 
thought of them. She gave them back to him, 
and only said, "Frank, you must watch over your- 
self unceasingly." It is a help to me that Sarah 
knows of this. I can be truer with frank judg- 
ing of actions and words through her. . 
It is possible that I may not go to H. Falls at 
all next summer; and it is possible that I may 
spend some weeks there. 

This last she did. Among the 
verses of the first year were these, 
which she also copied and sent to 
Kdnah ; indicating another mood of 
her young admirer : 

SONNET IV. 

One with sad, wrinkled brow said unto me : 
" Why will thou strive, since struggle is so 

vain ? 
Thou dost but fret and chafe thee with thy 
chain, — 
Thou canst not break it. No, — still waits for 

thee 
The common sorrow of mortality, — 
Restless to live, unsatisfied to die, 
Pining for freedom, and yet never free." 

" Yet will I never weep," calm answered I, 
" But wreathe these heavy fetters round with 
flowers; 
And through my grated window from the sky 
Catch cheering glimpses of the heaven's great 
eye, 
To shorten or to gladden my dull hours." 

And lo ! the prison walls bound me no more; 
One breath of Hope has opened wide the 
door. 

Our correspondence was incessant, 
and the Exeter post-office gave the 
opportunity to mail and receive letters 
without exciting gossip. Something 
like valentines passed in February, 
and on the 24th she wrote to Ednah : 

May I talk to you of F. ? I find him mingling 
more and more in my life; find it daily more 



difficult to turn my thoughts from him. I 
believe he is dearer to me now than ever before. 
I hear often from him ; he writes two letters to 
my one, generally; is he not good? I said to 
to C, " I did not suppose Frank's pride would let 
him do that." "Ah," said she, " his pride is great, 
but his love is greater, and has quite overcome 
it." She has seen all the letters. F. thinks it 
not right to send them through her otherwise, 
and it is through him that it has been so. I told 
her I did nor dare to speak to him as warmly as 
I felt; that by great effort I had compelled my- 
self to answer quietly, when he had lavished love 
upon me. This is to show you that I am truer 
than I feared. . . His winter seems to be 
much to him ; he writes fully of his life out- 
wardly as well as inwardly. I can't well realize 
that the Frank who cuts wood all day in the 
pine woods " where the birds are not afraid to 
come, and where the crows fly so near that one 
can hear their wings creak and rustle as they 
hurry along; and the sun shines through the 
trees, and over their tops at noon," is the same 
person who sits at night studying Greek, or talk- 
ing with me of Schiller and Emerson, Shelley 
and Plato ; doesn't it seem strange to you, too ? 
(March 19, 1851.) If it is finally decided that I 
do not go to H. Falls next summer, as seems 
likely now, I see no other way but for F. to come 
here in June. The excuse must be a pilgrimage 
to Monadnock, — not very difficult to see through, 
but sufficient to make no explanations necessary. 
I hate equivocation, but I am forced to it ; and 
if it is possible for F. to come, it would be 
possible for me to receive him. There is another 
way which may be open to me. I might go to 
H. F. and slay two or three weeks, spending 
only a fortnight with you at the beach. If any- 
thing should happen to prevent my being with 
your family, or if you were in Dublin, I should 
think this the best plan for me, apart from 
any thoughts of F. Put if I went to H. Falls, 
I know busy tongues would say it was for F.'s 
sake, and report would occupy itself about 
us both. Should I hesitate for that? What do 
you say ? 

There could be but one issue to all 
this ; the heart governs in such mat- 
ters, and I knew very early that her 
heart was mine. Nevertheless, there 
was the usual alternation of hope and 
fear, of jealousies and misunderstand- 
ings, out of which we always emerged 
with increased affection. I have 



-IS 



/■RAXh- II. SANBORN. 



never heard of a love more roman- 
tic and unselfish ; no permanent 
thought of ways and means, of foes 
or friends, came between us. I had 
been gifted with the power of winning 
friends without effort, — a gift that in 
her was carried to its highest point. 
She was beloved wherever she was 
seen, and had no enemy but her own 
self-accusing tenderness. Her life 



had inspired. Emerson's " Hermi- 
one " pictured the process : 

I am of ;i Mm 

That each for each doth fast 

In old Bassora's walls I seemed 

Hermit vowed to books and gloom, — 
III I" ■ 'om. 

I was by thy touch redeemed ; 
When thy meteor glances came, 
We talked at large of worldly fat< . 
And drew truly every tract. 




Peterborough 



had been such as to arouse compas- 
sion for one so endowed, and so fet- 
tered by illness : but that very afflic- 
tion had chastened her to a saintlineSS 

that was charmingly mingled with 
coquetry. "I love to be praised," 

-.he said ; "I love to be loved " . and 
tew were ever more beloved. By 

Heaven's direction her favor lighted 

on me ; and, as usual, she exagger- 
ated the qualities in me that herself 



It was so from the beginning 

with her. At her first visit to my 
town, years before 1 saw her, she 
wrote to a Boston friend 

I reached Hampton Falls safely and found 
my friend Cate just the same— deal good girl! 

- i . and pr< ifening h< i 
me Here have I tx ore, durin 

last week, living in true farmei like style, with 
but two or three neighbors, and no village 
within three miles. The situation is a pleasant 
itumn landsi api 



FRANK B. SANBORN. 



49 




Little Wood Opposite." 



from tr\ ' 'dow at my side, whose gentle 
beauty cic le good. There is much of bless" 
ing in«Jfat" re ' s silent sympathy. At night, too' 
we ha "Si^de view of the glorious stars, which 
seem to have been peculiarly beautiful these last 
two evenings. I have thought of you all as I 
looked for my favorite constellations. Dear, 
you showed me the Scorpion, — you, Corny, Cas- 
siopeia, and Ednah the Pleiades. All these were 
visible last night, and I am glad I can never 
look upon them without thoughts of you; is it 
not a pleasant association. Here too (as every- 
where else), have I met much kindly sympathy. 
Strangers greet me like a long expected friend; 
rough, old farmers speak with a softened tone 
to the invalid stranger; and though the 
grasp of their hand be somewhat rough, it is full 
of heart-warmth, and, therefore very pleasant 
to me. One evening I had a treat which I had 
not anticipated here,— really good music. A 
pretty Mrs. Tilton* sang like a woodland bird, 
and with Cate's sweet low voice for a second, it 
was beautiful. I love music dearly, andgood voices 



*This was Susan Jordan from Boston, who had 
been living at the same farmhouse (now gone), 
one of the oldest in the township, but was now mar- 
ried to a neighbor-farmer; she was a protegee ot 
the late Dr. Henrv Bowditch, and died in this ham- 
let, halfway from Exeter to Hampton Falls village. 

4 



are sweeter without an instrument than with it; 
so I did not miss the piano at all. 

This was written in the tame and 
lovely scenery of Hampton Falls, a 
lew miles from the seashore, in which 
this lover of nature always delighted, 
and which she needed to visit every 
summer. Her own native region of 
swift streams and mountains she once 
described thus: 

Yesterday I walked out for the first time for 
a long season. (February 24, 1S51.) I went on 
the snowcrust into the grove by the river, part 
way over the steep hill; and rested on a great 
rock which juts out over a high bank, and from 
which I looked down into the water just below 
me. Great twisted pines grow out of this bank, 
huge old sons of the forest; and thro' their 
thick branches I could see the gleaming of the 
first fall, which was close to me. The river is 
beautiful now, very full and swift; not a brook, 
as it is in the summer, but a rapid, rushing 
river. The sunshine coming into where I was 
sitting, through the pines overhead, made a 
kind of checquered light on the snow, and bright- 
ened into rainbow colors the icicles which fell 



5° 



FRANK B, SANBORN. 



from the trees yesterday and lay still on the 
crust. Add to this a perfect stillness of the win- 
ter woods, broken only by the noise of the 
water; and you will have the best of mv Sun- 
day. So much, darling, for the outward world. 
( >ur French progresses pretty well. Mi. Krone 
is my principal amusement; oh, that man! he is 
too funny for anything, as Mrs. Thompson 
would say. I have read the life of Dr. Chal- 
mers, which contains much that you would en- 
joy. I think, however, it is too long, a com- 
mon fault with Memoirs. lie was a tiery spirit. 
1 am reading Agassiz too. 

It was this house, in Grove Street, 
Peterborough, with its "little wood 
opposite" upon which her windows 
looked out, which is associated with 
her in my memory, and that of her 
surviving sister and her friends, — 
now alas ! but few, out of the many 
who rejoiced in her love. The engrav- 
ing shows it much as it then was, — 
one of two houses built by McKean, 
a skilful carpenter, about 1844, and 



both now owned by the Livingston 
family. But when we visited the 
Walkers there, it had a green bank 
sloping clown to the river, unobstruct- 
ed by the railway and its apparatus; 
across the amber water was the flower- 
encircled cottage of Miss Putnam, the 
"Lady Bountiful" of the village then, 
who gave Putnam Park to the public, 
and preserved the fine trees on her 
terraced river bank. On the oppo- 
site side from this west front was the 
garden, — small but neatly kept, and 
blooming in the season with Anna's 
favorite roses ; while the pine trees 
overhung the narrow street, and 
waved a sober welcome. 

This fac-simile of one of her small 
pages to Kdnah shows how she passed 
from one topic to another, in her let- 
ters; and how uncertain was her spell- 
ing and punctuation. In our four 







fill w 
n 11 III 



MHIIIH '' Jill 

I ' mm mill"'' 1 " 



u - 




, AT* 




V .• 






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52 



FRANK' A. SANBORN. 



years' correspondence she never quite 
mastered the difficult spelling of Tues- 
day, — indeed, her education had been 
interrupted by frequent illness, and 
was desultory, though remarkable 
for the many fields into which it 
led her, in five languages, — English, 
Italian, French, German and Latin. 
But in the reading of human life and 
character she was unsurpassed, and 
that, as she told me, was her chief 
study. To quote again from "Her- 



tact with graces like hers, native 
and untaught, but lacking in nothing 
of the perfection of good breeding. In 
no company, high or low, was she ever 
out of place. She was the delight of 
every circle in which she moved; and 
would have been, had her range of 
experience been world-wide. Her 
praise and her blame were equally 
useful and courteous; the impatience 
of which she complained in herself, 
and which had been a fault of her 




The River Bank. 



mione" (for Emerson was our daily 
library): 

C>nce I dwelt apart ; 
\"\v I live with all ; 

-hepherd's lamp, on far hillside, 
Seems, by the traveler espied, 

iot into the mountain's heart, — 
So didst thou quarry and unlock 
Highways for me through the roi k. 

To love this daughter of rural New 
Hampshire was more than "a liberal 
education," as Sir Richard Steele said 
of Lady Elizabeth Hastings; nothing, 
as mere intellectual training, was more 
stimulating and elevating than con- 



wayward childhood, was now trained 
to a fascinating caprice, which made 
her ever a surprise to her friends. In 
one of my visits, when she thought 
she was withdrawing herself into the 
cool grotto of friendship (which she 
kept saying was what she wished), 
suddenly she became as attractive as 
any of the Sirens, and I said to her, 
"Anna, how little I expected this; I 
did not even hope for it ; what has 
brought you into this dear mood ? I 
never find you twice the same ; when 
I think I have become sure of you, 



FRANK B. SANBORN. 



53 



and accustomed to some phase of you, 
— thinking it to be you, — suddenly 
you seem to me wholly other than 
I thought, and I feel as if I had never 
known you." Amid all these chang- 
ing moods, she never failed to be what 
the French quaintty term attachante ; 
and it was of her own sweet will that 
she was so. Never, in a long life, — 
now half a century since her death, — 
have I found another so truly a woman. 

Meantime my actual education at 
school and college went on ; though I 
was often called away by the phases 
of her illness, which, like everything 
about her, was strange and unexpect- 
ed. From the depths of what seemed 
a mortal illness, and which no physi- 
cian thoroughly understood, she would 
rally to a hopeful prospect of full recov- 
ery. But at last the forces of nature 
and her will were exhausted; she 
gradually passed through the Valley 
of the Shadow of Death, and perished 
in my arms, August 31, 1854. We 
had been married eight days before, 
at her wish, and in her father's Peter- 
borough house, where I had attended 
all the changes of her last summer on 
earth, and done all that true love 
could do to make the pathway easier. 

It was long before I could return 
to my college studies; but she had for- 
seen and directed all that, and even 
provided in her will that I should study 



in Germany. Yet the pressure of the 
conflict between Freedom and Slavery 
in Kansas, after I had graduated at 
Harvard in July, 1855, kept me in 
America, and brought me into relations 
with one as remarkable among men, as 
she I, had loved was among women — 
John Brown, of Kansas and Virginia. 
Of him and the events of his last three 
years my next chapter will treat. 

I have given much space to this 
four years' episode in my career, 
because I write for readers in New 
Hampshire. This romance of our 
lives was wholly of New Hampshire ; 
Boston was only an occasional scene 
for its development, when we met 
there at the houses of her friends or 
mine. Nearly all of them are now dead, 
— Mrs. Cheney, one of the last to pass 
away, after a long life of public and 
private usefulness. 

I have often said of my Ariana, — 
what Ivandor so modestly sung of his 
Ianthe, — Jane Swift, — in that verse 
addressed to the River Swift: 

Thou mindest me of her whose radiant morn 
Lighted my path to love; she bore thy name; 

She whoni no grace was tardy to adorn, 

Whom one lota voice pleased more than louder 
fame. 

Or that perfect distich in honor of the 
same Ianthe: 

Vita brevi fugitura! prior fugitura venustast 
Hoc saltern exiguo tempore duret amor. 



CHAPTER IV. 



JOHN BROWN AND BIS FRIENDS. 



I have noticed, in looking back 

upon my three and seventy years, 
what others must have observed, — 
how one marked event in early life 
leads to another marked event, and 
that to a third, and so on; as if by 
a chain of sequences arranged before- 
hand upon a scheme of life. It 
is this no doubt which has led so 
many men to view their careers 
as something foreordained, — a map 
shown of their destinies, which pointed 
out the way they were to go ; not 
compelling them to a given course, 
but indicating that as the line of least 
resistance. It was through the fact 
that my fathers had been parishioners 
of Parson Abbot, and the acquaint- 
ance had been kept up between the 
families, that I became the lover of 
Ariana Walker. It was she who de- 
termined my college education ; it 
was our mutual interest for the op- 
pressed that made me active in the 
cause of social and political freedom ; 
ami it was her brother George, a year 
or two after her death, who sent John 
Brown of Kansas to me with a letter 
of introduction, late in the year i 
Six years later it was this same 
brother-in-law. then in the state gov- 
ernment of Massachusetts I when the 
John Brown episode had been closed 
by the emancipation proclamation of 
Abraham Lincoln, and the victory at 
Gettysburg I, who suggested to me an 
appointment on the newly-created 
Board of State Charities, in i 
which has largely shaped the course 



of my public life for forty years. 
And it was through the acquaintance 
formed with his circle at Springfield, 
from 1853 to 1865, which led to my 
selection by his intimate friend, Sam- 
uel Bowles, as one of the editors of 
the Springfield Republican, — then 
and since one of the most influential 
journals in the United States, whose 
staff I had joined in 1S56, as a cor- 
respondent, and of which I became 
an editor in 1S6S. 

I cannot believe, therefore, that our 
human lives are subject to blind 
chance, or fortuitously directed by 
accident. Too many incidents in my 
own career, and those of my associ- 
ates, have shown me a more intelli- 
gent directing power, aside from the 
individual human will : what it is, in 
direct activity, I have hot too curi- 
ously inquired. But I have followed 
its intimations when they were clearly 
revealed, and have found my little 
bark steered by a hand wiser than my 
own. 

This is one aspect of that philoso- 
phy to which mere accident may have 
en, in America, the name of 
" Transcendental," and of which my 
long-time friends, Alcott and Emer- 
son, were the best representatives — 
unless it might be some simple-hearted 
Quakeress, illumined by the Inner 
it. John Brown, that descendant 
of Mayflower Pilgrims, held this faith 
also, and it led him into those dark. 
heroic ways whose issue was the forci- 
ble destruction of negro slavery, and 



FRANK B. SANBORN. 



55 



his own immortality of fame, as one 
of the two grand martyrs of that 
cause, — Abraham Lincoln being the 
other. I have met many men and 
women of eminent character, and of 
various genius and talents, among 
whom Brown stands by himself, — an 
occasion for dispute and blame as well 
as for an apotheosis of unselfish hero- 
ism, — but a man not to be passed over 
without comment by those w r ho read 
or hear the story of our times. 

At my graduation from Harvard in 
July, 1855, the slavery question had 
assumed a very alarming aspect. The 
slaveholding oligarchy who had ruled 
the land for a quarter-century, but 
whose policy had been threatened by 
the Missouri Compromise and the 
unexpected result of the Mexican 
War, had boldly repealed that Com- 
promise, and entered upon a course 
intended to make negro slavery a 
national and no longer a sectional 
evil. Against this violation of a com- 
pact supposed to be final, the whole 
North had risen up in wrath, and the 
administration of a New Hampshire 
president w T as deserted by his own 
state. He still adhered to the rash 
policy of Jefferson Davis and Caleb 
Cushing, then in his cabinet, and al- 
lowed the oligarchy to introduce their 
slave system from Missouri into the 
just organized territory of Kansas. 
The freemen of New England, Ohio 
and the Northwest set out at once to 
thwart this mischievous attempt, by 
colonizing Kansas with free laborers, 
owning their own farms, and tilling 
them with their own hands, or with 
labor honestly paid for. From the 
first I had taken an active interest in 
this conflict between freedom and 
chattel slaver}- ; had voted steadily in 
New Hampshire against President 



Pierce's party (including my grand- 
father and his nephew Norris), and in 
support of Hale, the bold and popu- 
lar Independent Democrat. Voting 
for the first time in Massachusetts, I 
joined the party of Charles Sumner 
and his friends, and shared their in- 
dignation at the brutal attack made 
on our senator by Brooks of South 
Carolina. Almost at the same point 
of time, the Missouri slaveholders, 
passively supported by Pierce and 
Jefferson Davis, had destroyed by 
violence the rising town of Lawrence 
(May, 1856), and kindled civil war in 
Kansas by their outrages. The peo- 
ple of Massachusetts, by a large 
majority, were supporters of the Free 
State cause in Kansas, and were also 
earnest in assisting their own young 
men who had gone to settle in that 
territory. Consequently, soon after 
the attack on Lawrence I assisted in 
raising a large subscription in aid of 
Kansas, and became secretary, first 
of the Concord town committee, then 
of a Middlesex county committee, 
and finally, before 1856 closed, of 
State Kansas Committee, of which 
my friend George Stearns was chair- 
man, and Dr. S. G. Howe, Dr. Sam- 
uel Cabot and the late Judge Russell 
of Plymouth were active members. 
Of the county committee John Nes- 
mith, afterwards lieutenant-gov- 
ernor, was chairman, and C. C. Esty, 
afterwards member of Congress, 
Charles Hammond, a distinguished 
teacher, and James Jennison, a Har- 
vard tutor, were members, with 
others. During my absence in Illi- 
nois, Iowa and Nebraska, in August, 
1856, my neighbor, John S. Keyes 
(later sheriff and judge of a local 
court), acted as secretary, for a single 
meeting, of the county committee, 



56 



FRANK />. SLAVIC A' X. 



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^^k 



and his record is worth citing in fac 
simile : 

This county committee took meas- 
ures to canvass all Middlesex for 
funds, and I spent the first half of my 
summer vacation (I had gone to Con- 
cord in March, [855, before graduat- 
ing, to teach the children of Emerson, 
Judge Hoar and their friends) in 
driving over half the county in a 
chaise to organize town committees 
and raise money. The effect of this 
was that in February, 1857, when I 
reported the financial results of our 
work, we had raised $17,383 in money 
and supplies from a population of 



195,000 then living in Middlesex. 
Of this sum, Concord had given 
$2,242, from a population of 2,251. 
The money raised had been turned 
over mainly to the state committee of 
Stearns, Howe and Cabot, — 54,677 
going to them directly from the giv- 
ers, and $5,550 by vote of the Middle- 
sex committee. But Si , 100 was voted 
to the national committee at Chicago. 
S900 to Colonel Higginson, who led a 
party of free state men into Kansas, 
to the Emigrant Aid Company, 
and something like $225 to lecturers 
at public meetings, for their service 
and expenses. The clothing and 



FRANK B. SANBORN. 



57 



other supplies were turned over either 
to the Emigrant Aid Company or the 
state committee, to be forwarded. 
Besides giving $100 in the Concord 
subscription (as did Judge Hoar, his 
venerable father, and J. S. Keyes) I 
had visited Chicago, Iowa and Ne- 
braska City in August, at my own 
expense, to see that the way for emi- 
grants through Iowa and Nebraska 
was open, and to confer with Messrs. 




Dole, Harvey Hurd and Captain 
Webster (a New Hampshire officer, 
afterwards General Webster of 
Grant's staff), of the National Com- 
mittee, and with young Horace 
White, their secretary. The ending 
of my vacation would not let me go 
through to Lawrence ; nor did I 
meet John Brown on his visit to 
southwestern Iowa early in August, 
nor again in early October. He had 
gone back to southern Kansas before 
I reached Iowa in August, and I had 



returned home early in September, 
1856. 

In October I arranged with the 
State Kansas Committee to become 
their corresponding secretary, and for 
the winter sessions of my school em- 
ployed a student in Harvard to take 
my place while I kept the office 
of the committee in Niles's Block 
on School Street, Boston. There, 
early in January, 1857, Brown called 
on me one morning, bringing a letter 
of introduction from my brother 
Walker, who had been chairman of a 
Kansas committee for Hampden 
county, but who had known Brown 
intimately as a wool merchant in , 
Springfield ten years before. I intro- 
duced Brown to Dr. Howe and Theo- 
dore Parker, to various public audi- 
ences, and to a legislative committee 
of Massachusetts in the state house. 
The first draft of Brown's speech, in 
answer to the questions of the legisla- 
tors, is in my hands, as follows, in 
part : (See next page.) 

I have found here and there a per- 
son, in my .wanderings over two con- 
tinents, who did not believe freedom 
was a good thing for others ; but I 
never happened to meet one who did 
not think it an excellent thing for 
himself. Persons naturally slavish I 
have seen, as old Aristotle had; but 
even they, in their hearts, chose free- 
dom, while in act they submitted to 
bondage. If by chance they had 
escaped, they would have said to any 
one who asked, as the fugitive in 
Canada was asked, "Why did you 
run away from a good home, where 
you had plenty to eat and wear, a 
kind master and not much to do?" 
"Why, Boss, dat sitiwation is open 
right now, if you wants to go and 
apply for it." In short, freedom is 



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FRANK B. SANBORN. 



59 



the natural desire of mankind, — even 
where servitude is their natural con- 
dition. And I belong to a small and 
fast dwindling band of men and 
women, who fifty, sixty and seventy 
years ago resolved that all other per- 
sons ought to be as free as ourselves. 
Many of this band made sacrifices 
for the cause of freedom, — the free- 
dom of others, not their own. Some 
sacrificed their fortunes and their 
lives. One man, rising above the 
rest by a whole head, gave his life, 
his small fortune, his children, his rep- 
utation — all that was naturally dear 
to him — under conditions which have 
kept him in memory, although other 
victims are forgotten or but dimly 
remembered. John Brown fastened 
the gaze of the whole world upon his 
acts and his fate ; the speeding years 
have not lessened the interest of man- 
kind in his life and death ; and each 
succeeding generation inquires what 
sort of man he truly was. The time 
is coming — and has already arrived 
in some regions — when Brown will be 
regarded as a mythical personage, 
incarnating some truth or some desire 
dear to the human race, but not a 
flesh-and-blood man at all. His 
career had elements of romance and 
improbability, such as make us doubt 
the actual existence of legendary he- 
roes, like Hercules, Samson, Arthur, 
Roland and the Spanish Cid. But he 
was a very real and actual person — 
only a peculiar and remarkable one, 
like Joan of Arc — one of those who 
appear from time to time, to verify 
the saying, " Man alone can perform 
the impossible." What more impos- 
sible than that a village-girl of France 
should lead the king's armies to vic- 
tory ? — unless it were that a sheep- 
farmer and wool-merchant of Ohio 



should foreshow and rehearse the for- 
cible emancipation of four millions of 
American slaves. 

Historians have not dealt very sage- 
ly with this typical character. They 
have looked at him through the wrong 
end of the telescope, with colored 
lenses and ill-adjusted focus ; they 
have not seen that he was one of those 
rare types, easily passing into the 
mythical, to which belonged David, 
the shepherd, Tell, the mountaineer, 
Wallace, the outlaw, and Hofer, the 
Tyrolese innkeeper. Born of the peo- 
ple, humble of rank and obscure in 
early life, these men (if men they all 
were) drew towards them the wrath 
of the powerful, the love of the mul- 
titude ; they were hunted, prisoned, 
murdered, — but every blow struck at 
them only made them dearer to the 
heart of the humble. By these, and 
not by coteries of scholars in their 
libraries, the fame of heroes is estab- 
lished. In heroes, faults are par- 
doned, crimes forgotten, exploits mag- 
nified, — their life becomes a poem or 
a scripture, — they enter that enviable 
earthly mortality which belongs to 
the story of a race, and can never be 
left out of literature. 

I first met John Brown, a little less 
than fifty years ago, when he was not 
quite 57 years old ; my acquaintance 
with him continued hardly three 
years ; yet I seem to have known him 
better, and to have seen him oftener 
than those who have journeyed beside 
me in life's path for sixty years. My 
actual intercourse with him hardly 
exceeded a month ; my correspond- 
ence was some two and a half years 
(from February, 1857, to September, 
1859), and that infrequent; yet the 
momentous events in which he had a 
share give to that brief intercourse 



6o 



FRANK /?. SANBORN. 



the duration of a lifetime. Nay, 
Thoreau was literally as well as fig- 
uratively right when he ascribed to 
Brown a practical immortality: "Of 
all the men who were said to be my 
contemporaries, it seems to me that 
John Brown is the only one who has not 
died. I meet him at every turn. He 
is more alive than ever he was. He 
is no longer working in secret. He 
works in public, and in the clearest 
light that shines on this land.'' 

It is true that Brown worked in 
secret all the time that I knew him, 
yet he had no aims but public ones ; 
and nothing which he did needs now 
to be concealed. Men are not yet 
agreed that all he did was perfectly 
right : it would be strange if they had 
been ; but there is a general agree- 
ment that he was himself right, as 
Governor Andrews said on a memo- 
rable occasion. He knew the inward 
cancer that was feeding on this repub- 
lic ; he pointed to the knife and the 
cautery that must extirpate it ; he 
even had the force and nerve to make 
the first incision. 

Lord Rosebery, speaking of cer- 
tain national junctures, said, "What 
is then wanted is not treasures, nor 
fleets, nor legions, but a man, — the 
man of the moment, the man of des- 
tiny." "In such men," he added, 
with Wallace chiefly in mind, "there 
is. besides their talents, their spirit, 
their character, that magnetic fluid 
which enables them to influence vast 
bodies of their fellow-men, and makes 
them a binding and stimulating power 
outside the circle of their own fasci- 
nation." This character Brown had, 
ami it grew out of his courage, his 
self-sacrifice and his implicit faith in 
God. These traits cannot long be 
simulated; nor is it easy to disguise 



selfishness in a mask of generosity. 
The less courage, the more self-love 
men have, the more easily do they 
recognize the opposites, sometimes 
only to hate and belittle them ; but 
the mass of men, and nearly all 
women, finally or speedily admire, 
and then worship. There was wis- 
dom, as well as bitter wit, in a reply 
of Talleyrand to some French invent- 
or of a new religion, who asked him 
how it could best be propagated. 
"Nothing easier ; get yourself cruci- 
fied for it." 

It was a religion by no means new 
which inspired Brown. Early in my 
acquaintance with him he said, "I 
believe in the Golden Rule and the 
Declaration of Independence ; to me 
they both mean the same thing. It 
would be better that a whole genera- 
tion — men, women and children — 
should pass away by a violent death, 
than that one jot of either should fail 
in this country." 

It may be asked if from the first 
the greatness of Brown's nature was 
to be recognized. It is not given young 
men to know all things — though they 
are mercifully kept from seeing this ; 
but there is a certain divining 
quality in youth which lets it behold 
more in simple men than the hardened 
veteran can discern. From our first 
meeting it was clear to me that Brown 
was ho common man ; his face, his 
walk, his whole bearing proclaimed 
it. Like Cromwell, whom in certain 
traits he much resembled, he had 
cleared his mind of cant ; the hollow 
formulas of scholars, priests and poli- 
ticians had no force with him. He 
had a purpose : knew what it was, 
and meant to achieve it. Who shall 
say that he did not? The emancipa- 
tion of our slaves could not be the 



FRANK B. SANBORN. 



61 



work of any one man, or of a million 
men ; it was finally wrought by Lincoln 
with a stroke of his pen ; but even 
then it cost thousands of lives and the 
patient work of years to confirm what 
Lincoln had written. John Brown 
convinced the leaders of opinion on 
both sides that slavery must die or 
the nation could not live ; and that 
was the first long step towards our 
emancipation. 

He came to me as mentioned, with 
a note of introduction from George 
Walker of Springfield — both of us 
being Kansas committee-men, work- 
ing to maintain the freedom of that 
territory, and Brown had been one of 
the fighting men there in the summer 
of 1856, just before. His theory 
required fighting in Kansas; it was 
the only sure way, he thought, to 
keep that region free from the curse 
of slavery. His mission now was to 
levy war on it, and for that to raise 
and equip a company of a hundred 
well-armed men who should resist 
aggression in Kansas, or occasionally 
carry the war into Missouri. Behind 
that purpose, but not yet disclosed, 
was his intention to use the men thus 
put into the field for incursions into 
Virginia or other slave states. Our 
State Kansas Committee, of which I 
was secretary, had a stock of arms 
that Brown wished to use for this 
company, and these we voted to him. 
They had been put in the custody of 
the National Committee at Chicago, 
and it was needful to follow up our 
vote by similar action in the National 
Committee. For this purpose I was 
sent to a meeting of that committee at 
the Astor House, in New York, as 
the proxy of Dr. Howe and Dr. Sam- 
uel Cabot — both members of the 
National Committee. I met Brown 



there, and aided him in obtaining from 
the meeting an appropriation of $5,- 
000 for his work in Kansas, of which, 
however, he only received $500. The 
committee also voted to restore the 
custody of two hundred rifles to the 
Massachusetts committee which had 
bought them ; well knowing that we 
should turn them over to John Brown, 
as we did. He found them at Tabor, 
Iowa, in the following September, 
and took possession ; it was with a 
part of these rifles that he entered 
Virginia two years later. 

At this Astor House meeting Brown 
was closely questioned by some of the 
National Committee, particularly by 
Mr. Hurd of Chicago, as to what 
he would do with money and arms. 
He refused to pledge himself to use 
them solely in Kansas, and declared 
that his past record ought to be a 
sufficient guarantee that he should 
employ them judiciously. If we 
chose to trust him, well and good, 
but he would neither make pledges 
nor disclose his plans. Mr. Hurd 
had some inkling that Brown would 
not confine his warfare to Kansas, 
but the rest of us were willing to trust 
Brown, and the money was voted. 

In the following February — the 
Astor House meeting was Jan. 23 and 
24, 1857 — I introduced Brown before 
a committee of the Massachusetts 
Legislature, where he made the speech 
just quoted in aid of a state appro- 
priation by Massachusetts to protect 
the Free-State settlers who had gone 
from that state to Kansas. Such an 
appropriation had been voted in Ver- 
mont ; and we also came near carry- 
ing one ; it was finally voted down. 
Brown spoke forcibly, reading much 
from the paper above cited, describ- 
ing: the losses inflicted in Kansas on 



62 



FRANK D. SANBORN. 



the free-state men. He afterwards 
spoke at a public meeting in Concord, 
and in course of the winter at Wor- 
cester also, and in other places. Latein 
March I met him again in New York, 
and we went together to Kaston in 
Pennsylvania, where ex-Governor 
Reeder of Kansas was living, to per- 
suade him to return to Kansas, and 
become the head of our Free-State 
party there in the spring ot [857. 

Shortly before this journey Brown 
had visited me in the house of Ellery 
Channing, at Concord, where I had 
been living with my sister for two 
years ; it stood opposite the house of 
Henry Thoreau's father and mother, 
with whom he was then living, and 
where he died five years later. It 
was on Friday that he came up from 
Boston, and at noon we went across 
the street to dine with the Thoreau 
family. All Concord had heard of 
Brown's rights and escapes in Kansas 
the summer before, and Thoreau 
wished to meet him. As I had engage- 
ments in the afternoon, I left Brown 
talking with Thoreau, who easily saw 
what manner of man he was, and to 
whom he narrated in detail his most 
noted fight in Kansas — the Black 
Jack engagement, where, with nine 
men. he captured twenty-two men 
under Captain Pate. While they sat 
conversing, in the early afternoon, 
Emerson, who lived at the other 
(eastern) end of the Village, came up 
to call on Thoreau, and was there 
introduced to Brown. From this day's 
conversation, and what followed the 
next night, which Brown spent as 
Emerson's -nest, came that intimate 
acquaintance with Brown's character 
and general purposes which enabled 
Thoreau and Kmerson in 1859 to 
make those addresses in praise of him 



that did so much to turn the tide of 
sentiment in his favor, after his cap- 
ture at Harper's Ferry. But to 
ueither of them, nor to me at that 
time, did he open his Virginian plans ; 
and he would never unfold them fully 
to Wendell Phillips, much as they 
valued each other. The reason he 
gave me, a year later, for this reti- 
cence with Phillips, was noteworthy. 
He had charge d me to make his plan 
known to Theodore Parker, Dr. Howe 
and Col. Higginson, on my return 
from Gerrit Smith's house in Peter- 
boro, X. Y., where he had communi- 
cated it to me, after making Mr. and 
Mrs. Smith acquainted with it. I asked 
him if I should mention it to Mr. 
George Stearns or to Mr. Phillips. 
He replied that he would himself 
talk with Mr. Stearns when he saw 
him; as for Mr. Phillips, "I have 
noticed," said Brown, " that men who 
have the gift of eloquence, as our 
friend has it, seldom are men of action : 
now it is men of action I wish to con- 
sult ; and so you need say nothing to 
Wendell Phillips." 

On the Sunday morning following 
this interview between Brown, Tho- 
reau and Iiruerson, I called in a chaise 
at lunersou's house, where Brown 
had breakfasted, and drove with him 
across the country from Concord to 
Medford to visit Mr. Stearns, who 
then and afterwards was one of his 
most devoted and efficient friends. 
As we went along through Lexington 
and West Medford, talking of his 
campaigns in Kansas, and of his visits 
to Kuropean battlefields in [849, 
Brown directed my attention to places 
similar to those he had chosen for 
encampment or fortification on the 
prairies ; alleging that it was not the 
strongest positions that are usually 



FRANK B. SANBORN. 



63 



taken on hilltops, but that a ravine, 
well guarded on the flanks, was often 
a better military post. This was 
strange doctrine to me, and I remind- 
ed him of the clansman's remark in 
"Waverley," — "Even a haggis (God 
bless her ! ) can charge down hill ; ' ' 
but he maintained his opinion. He 
told me of the battlefields he had seen 
in Europe, Waterloo among them, 
and criticised the Austrian and French 
soldiers, whose reviews he had seen, 
saying (what the sequel soon verified) 
that the Austrians, with all their drill 
and precision, would be beaten by 
armies that moved more rapidly. His 
mind was then much occupied with 
plans of warfare, defensive and aggres- 
sive ; but he did not fail to note all 
common things which passed under 
his eagle's eye. His habit of reflec- 
tion and comparison was inborn and 
long cultivated. His conversation 
was modest but singularly instructive ; 
his manner was grave and diffident, 
yet full of respect and consideration. 
I have often heard and seen it said 
that Brown was unbalanced in mind 
— even insane. At the age of twenty- 
five I had no great personal experi- 
ence with insane persons, but since 
1863 I have seen and talked with 
many thousands in manj^ states and 
countries, in different phases of insan- 
ity. Looking back I see clearly what 
I then felt instinctively, that no man 
had more fully the control of his own 
mind than Brown. Not the least of 
the many indications by which I can 
now recognize even slight aberrations 
of mind, were visible in him ; firmness 
and steadiness of soul, under the 
guidance of an inflexible will, but one 
in humble submission to a foreseeing, 
just and benign Divine will — these 
were conspicuous traits. From what 



is called ordinary prudence he was 
not exempt ; but he had in full meas- 
ure that higher, extraordinary pru- 
dence which teaches the superior man 
how to live and when to die, for accom- 
plishing a grand purpose . This higher 
prudence overrides the lower, as the 
higher law, at which Webster scoffed, 
overrules ordinary statutes ; and Brown 
was the greatest example the nine- 
teenth century saw of Emerson's 
lofty maxim — 

Though Love repine — and Reason chafe, 
There comes a voice without reply — 

" 'Tis man's perdition to be safe 

When for the truth he ought to die." 

In the conversations of Brown at 
Concord his ultimate plans were not 
revealed, but his spirit and character 
were fully seen. A casual glance, a 
frivolous mind might be deceived in 
John Brown ; his homely garb and 
plain manners did not betoken great- 
ness, but neither could they disguise 
it from penetrating eyes. That antique 
and magnamimous character which 
afterwards, amid wounds and fetters 
and ferocious insults, suddenly fas- 
tened the gaze of the whole world ; 
those words of startling simplicity 
then uttered among the corpses of his 
men and the ruin of his desperate 
enterprise, before his partial judges, 
or in his prison cell — all things that 
were peculiar to this man, and dis- 
tinguished him among the multitude 
— lost nothing of their force when he 
was seen at nearer view, and heard 
within the walls of a library. His 
impressive personality, whose echoes 
so long filled the air of our armed 
camps, and are still heard in strains 
of martial music, lacked nothing of 
its effect on the few who came 
within his influence before the world 
recosrnized him. 



64 



FRANK B. SANBORN. 



He first unfolded his extreme plans 
for attacking slavery in Virginia, on 
the evening of Washington's birth- 
day, [858, in an upper chamber of 
Gerrit .Smith's villa at Peterboro, 
where, amid his inherited acres which 
he managed with noble generosity, 
that baronial democrat lived and bore 
his part in our struggle for liberty. 
I mean, he unfolded them to me and 
my college classmate, Edwin Morton 
of Plymouth ; for he had already 
opened them to Mr. and Mrs. Smith, 
in more private conversations, and 
they had signified a general approval. 
Now he read us the singular constitu- 
tion recently drawn up by him (in 
Frederick Douglass' house at Roch- 
ester), for the government of the ter- 
ritory, small or large, which he might 
rescue by force from the curse of 
slavery, and for the control of his 
own little band. It was an amazing 
proposition — desperate in its charac- 
ter, wholly inadequate in its provi- 
sion of means, and of very uncertain 
result. Such as it was, Brown had 
set his heart on it ; he looked upon it 
as the shortest way to restore our 
slave- cursed republic to the princi- 
ples of the Declaration of Indepen- 
dence ; and he was ready to die in its 
execution — as he did. 

We dissuaded him from what we 
thought certain failure ; urging all 
the objections that would naturally 
occur to persons desiring the end he- 
was seeking, but distrusting the 
slender means and the unpropitious 
time. Hut no argument could pre- 
vail against his fixed purpose ; he 
was determined to make the at- 
tempt, with many or with few, and 
he left us only the alternatives of 
betrayal, desertion or support. We 
chose the last, but more from a high 



regard for the man than with much 
hope of success. 

The results of our support and of 
Brown's action in Virginia are well 
known of all men. He struck at 
American slavery the severest blow it 
had ever received ; and his tragic ex- 
periment, though for a few months it 
seemed to have failed, was a great 
hastening cause of that bloody rebel- 
lion in which slavery perished. Brown 
was executed December 2, 1859; 
three years and thirty days afterward, 
President Lincoln issued the final 
decree of emancipation ; and in six 
years from the date of Brown's death, 
not a slave remained in bondage, of 
the four millions for whose redemption 
he had died. Seldom in human his- 
tory have such great results so rapidly 
followed magnanimous deeds. With- 
out claiming for Brown more than he 
modestly claimed for himself, I have 
always said he was an instrument in 
the hands of Providence, to uproot 
and destroy an evil institution : which 
had never appeared more boastful, 
more flourishing or more permanent 
than when, only eight years before 
final emancipation, Brown entered 
the broad domain of Kansas, which 
the slaveholders, by force and fraud, 
were holding as their own. I 
had aided, in a small way, to estab- 
lish freedom in Kansas ; and I assisted, 
to the extent of my power, the des- 
perate undertaking of Brown against 
slavery in the entire .South. Others 
contended against the monstrous mis- 
chief in other ways, and it is impossi- 
ble to estimate the exact share which 
Garrison, Phillips, Parker, Mrs. Stowe 
and the anti-slavery champions in 
general had in the final victory. But 
we may well say that to none except 
John Brown and Abraham Lincoln 



FRANK B. SANBORN. 65 

was it granted to make the initial and walking ghost of 50 years ago, rises 

the final attack on the very seat of up to defend— not slavery itself but 

slavery's power, and to die in the some of its accessories. In doing this 

hour of victory, winning the double they naturally turn aside to belittle 

glory of champions and of martyrs, and abuse the memory of John Brown. 

That contest is long since over : our Ineffective must all their malice and 

country is free from chattel slavery, misprision be; his place is taken, 

and only a few embittered or fantas- once for all, among immortal names, 

tical persons now regret its disap- What he thought of himself five days 

pearance. Here and there a college before his death may be read on the 

professor, a belated editor or some next two pages : 

«<^Cjtk^ /^t <Lr£<r I* £> Ct^ »ry ^k_ ^t^Ji^tZ' J ' h*AH ^^ ^~ 
&*/ Aa- hn^rh* fact ' OnvuJ ^n^v/7ruy^ suetlsrfjf' £utd,ei<7Ks -un.< levm. ttitoA tt-*-± . to 

cJ^/KaU^M^ U^JUtry'tiu C . T< Ur>^J<7&ot (fix*. : ^£ e^2^'^/^ C ^^ ~^~~ 

fc-^lJL *Jh» : £ erf Ax- i*™JL.~krv^~te vU^L^^^U^^nrf^. ow *&*- A^^tO- 
JfcUjt J *siUO U^cL ^a-o^ i<X- brffci-^'4- J/*"-' <St***^rf'u>tn-Jk. toS7*>uJ&- 
yrOL. f4^/i*Z^ pi/t^y <htjLA <rh eu Lefty efi^ X^<^^- "fyr*" / * >u - ^ -^ 

nslit'L )lu*A~ jut- LtS^tfttyrf $ri+un^. J1<J?M J^jury^^A W^i. ^^ ^ 



66 FRANK />'. SANBORN. 


















In my "Life and Letters of John will be fully explained. Col. Hig- 

Brown " (Boston, 1885) and in my ginson has yet to publish his final 

memoir of Dr. Howe (New York, account of his own relation to the 

1 891) I have narrated quite fully my conflict in Kansas and its strange 

connection with Brown's enterprises, sequel at Harper's Ferry and Charles- 

and given my estimate of his charac- town. The estimate made of Brown 

ter. In a recent number of the by Emerson and Thoreau has been 

Ctitic magazine I have shown the widely read, and I have quoted some 

relation of Gerrit Smith to the foray passages from Bronson Alcott on the 

in Virginia; and in the forthcoming subject. But he showed me, forty 

biography of Major Stearns by his years a.^o, other entries in his diary 

son, F. P. Stearns, my former pupil, which preserve interesting facts as 

his father's connection with Brown well as opinions. 



FRANK B. SANBORN. 



67 




John Brown in I 859. 



From Alcott's Diary of 1859. 
Tuesday, Oct. 23. More about Captain Brown 
in today's papers; the trial at Charlestown, Va. f 
and its incidents. I am pleased to read that 
his friends here are obtaining good counsel for 
his defence, if the trial can be conducted with 
any fairness in that slave state. But an unbiased 
jury, a righteous judge cannot be got there, and 
he must take the extreme penalties, we are sure. 
Oct. 26, Evening. See Sanborn at Emerson's 
house; he ha! come home from looking into 
Capt. Brown's affairs. He was Brown's friend 
and entertained him here last May, as well as 
on a former visit in 1857. Ellery Channing is 
at Emerson's also, and we discuss the matter at 
length, I defending the deed, under the circum- 
stances, and the Man. His rescue would be 
difficult, even if he would consent to be taken. 
And the spectacle of a martyrdom such as his 
must needs be, will be of greater service to the 



country, and to the coming in of a righteous rule 
than years of agitation by the Press, or the 
voices of partisans, North and South. 'Twas 
a bold stroke, this of his, for justice universal, 
and it damages all (political) parties beyond 
repair. Even the Republicans must in some 
sense claim him as theirs in self defence, and to 
justify Republicanism in the people's eyes as 
freedom's defender. 

Wednesday, 9th November. Thoreau calls on 
me at the Orchard House. He thinks some 
one from the North should see Gov. Wise, or 
write concerning Brown's character and motives, 
to influence the governor in his favor. Thoreau 
is the man to write, or Emerson. But there 
seems little or no hope of pleas for mercy. 
Slavery must have its way and Wise must do its 
bidding on peril of his own safety. 

Nov. 28. Evening at the Town Hall, a meet- 
ing being called there to make arrangements for 



68 



FRANK B. SANBORN. 



celebrating by appropriate services the day of 
Captain Brown's execution. Simon Brown, I>r. 
Bartlett, Keye>. Emerson and Thoreau ad- 
dressed the meeting; and Emerson, Thoreau, 
Brown and Keyes are chosen a committee to 
prepare the service proper for the occasion. 
Sanborn is present also. Thoreau has taken a 
prominent part in the movement and chiefly 
arranged for it. 

Nov. JO. See Thoreau again, and Emerson, 
concerning the brown services on Friday, I'ec. 
2. We do not intend to have any speeches 
made on the occasion, but have selected appro- 
priate passages from brown's words, from the 
- and from the scriputres, to be read by 
Thoreau, Emerson and myself, chiefly. The 
selection and arrangement is our. Dec. /. 
Again see Thoreau and Emerson. It is under- 
stood that I am to read the Martyr's Service. 
Thoreau the selections from the poets and 
Emerson those from Brown's words. I copy 
the passages I am to read from the Wisdom of 
Solomon, David's Psalms and also from Plato. 
Sanborn has written a dirge, which will be sung, 
and Rev. E. II. Sears from Wayland, will otter 
prayer. 

These arrangements were carried 
out in the presence of a large audi- 
ence. My dirge was sung ; but a 
more prophetic verse was indited by 
Mr. Sears, writing on his hymn book 
as the service proceeded. It was this: 

Not any space six feet by two 

Will hold a man like thee; 
John Brown will tramp the shaking earth 

From blue Ridge to the sea, 
Till the strong Angel come at last 

And opes each dungeon door, 
And God's Great Charter holds and waves 

O'er all His humble poor. 

Hardly had this funeral service 
been performed, and the body of 
Brown slowly made its way to its 
forest grave in the Adirondacs, 
where it is now included in the State 
Park of New York, when the Senate 
at Washington organized a special 
committee, headed by James M. 
Mason of Virginia and Jefferson I >avis 
of Mississippi to investigate the Vir- 
ginia foray, and fasten the responsi- 



bility of it, if possible, on Seward, 
Chase, Sumner and the other leaders 
of the Republican party. This com- 
mittee issued writs for the presence 
of witnesses, among them John Brown, 
Jr. and myself. My subpieua does 
not seem to have been preserved ; but 
here is a copy of that one served on 
Brown's eldest son at Dorset in Ohio. 

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 
Committee Room of the Select Committee of 

the Senate of the United States, Januarv 20, 
i860. 

To John brown, Jr. of Ashtabula Countv, 
Ohio. 

Greeting : 

Pursuant to the annexed resolution of the 
Senate of the United States, passed on the 14th 
of December, A. I). 1S59. you are hereby com- 
manded to appear before the Committee there- 
in named, in their room at the capitol, in the 
city of Washington, on Monday, the 30th day of 
January next, then and there to testify what you 
may know relative to the subject matter em- 
braced in the said resolution. Hereof fail not, 
as you will answer your default under the pains 
and penalties in such cases made and provided. 

Given under my hand and seal, by order of 
the Committee, this 20th day of January in the 
year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred 
and sixty. 

(Signed) J. M. Mason, Chairman of the 
Select Committee of t lie Senate of the 
States. 

Resolved, That a committee be appointed to 
inquire into the facts attending the late invasion 
and seizure of the armory and arsenal of the 
United States at Harper's Ferry in Virginia, by 
a band of armed men. . . 

And that said committee have power to send 
for persons and papers. 

(i >n the reverse.) 

To Dunning R. McNair, Sergeant-at-Arms of 
the Senate of the United States: 

You are hereby commanded to serve and 
return the within subpoena according to law. 

Dated at Washington this 20th day of Janu- 
ary in the year of our Lord i860. 

I. M. Mason. Chairman if the Select Commit- 
tee. 

Mr. McXair did not take the trouble 
to serve this writ, but sent it to H. 
Johnson, the U. S. marshal of the 



FRANK B. SANBORN. 



69 



Northern district of Ohio (in my case 
to Marshal Freeman of Sandwich, 
Mass.), who sent it to Mr. Brown 
with a letter containing this interest- 
ing assurance from Senator Mason : 

If you can get an interview or other means 
of communication with him, he may be induced 
to come under the assurance you can give — 
that, by a late law of Congress, no person who 
has been summoned as a witness before a com- 
mittee of Congress can afterwards be held to 
answer upon a criminal charge, for any fact or 
act done or committed by him, to which his tes- 
timony may refer. Thus should the witness 
have done anything in connection with the Har- 
per's Ferry affair, which might subject him to 
prosecution, by testifying before the Committee 
he will be thenceforth exempt from prosecu- 
tion. 

Notwithstanding this, John Brown, 
Jr. , refused to go to Washington for 
two reasons, — first, because he would 
be liable to seizure in passing through 
Virginia or Maryland ; and next 
because he would not testify against 
others at the price of his own exemp- 
tion. I received no such previous 
assurance from Mason, but when I 
offered to testify in Massachusetts, 
through fear of lack of protection in 
Washington, Mason assured me that 
he would be personally responsible 
for my safety. I was not so much 
concerned for that as resolved never 
to testify before slaveholders in regard 
to my friends. 

Senator Mason refused my pro- 
posal to testify in Massachusetts, as 
I supposed he would, and I then 
wrote him that under no conditions 
would I appear before his committee, 
but throw myself on my rights as a 
citizen of Massachusetts, reminding 
him also that I could hardly rely on 
his offer of protection, since my 
friend, Senator Sumner, had been 
brutally assaulted a few months 
earlier, in the senate chamber it- 



self. He then reported me in con- 
tempt of the authority of the senate, 
which, in February (the 16th), voted 
my arrest. I retired for a few weeks 
from general observation, until I 
had drawn up and forwarded my for- 
mal protest against the illegal action 
of the senate, sending two copies of 
it to Washington, — one to the vice- 
president, Breckenridge of Ken- 
tucky, and the other to the New 
Hampshire senator, J. P. Hale. 

During my absence from Concord 
I visited the family of John Brown in 
North Elba, N. Y., and arranged 
that his daughters, Anne and Sarah, 
should come to Concord and enter 
my school as pupils. 

Returning home I visited Boston 
and my native town in New Hamp- 
shire, where I gave a public lecture, 
and some time in March took up my 
daily business as head master of the 
Concord school. After so long an 
interval and so many opportunities 
for my arrest, which I was now quite 
ready for, I naturally concluded that 
the officers of the senate had given 
up any purpose they might have had 
to carry me to Washington, and dis- 
missed the matter from my mind. 
My neighbors and friends, however, 
were solicitous about it, and I was 
once or twice notified from Boston 
that I might be visited by the 
officers. In the meantime John 
Brown, Jr., had successfully defied 
arrest in Ohio ; James Redpath had 
done the same and neither was mo- 
lested. 

On the night of April 3, i860, I 
had been out making calls in the 
village of Concord, returning to my 
house on Sudbury Street, about 9 
o'clock, and was sitting quietly in 
my study up stairs when the door- 



7 o 



FRANK' /». SANBORN. 



bell rang. The one servant, Julia 
Leary, had gone to bed. My sister 
Sarah, who was then my house- 
keeper, was in her chamber, and, 
without anticipating any harm, I 
went down stairs into the front hall 
and answered the bell myself. A 
young man presented himself and 
handed me a note, which I stepped 
back to read by the light of the hall 
lamp. It said that the bearer was a 
person deserving charity, and I am 
satisfied that he was so before he 
got away from Concord that night. 
When I looked up from reading the 
note four more men had entered my 
hall, and one of them, Silas Carleton 
by name (a Boston tipstaff, as I 
afterwards learned), came forward 
and laid his hand on me, saying, " I 
arrest you." 

I said, ''By what authority? If 
you have a warrant read it, for I 
shall not go with you unless you 
show your warrant." 

Carleton, or the youth who had 
begged my charity, then began to 
read the order of the senate for my 
arrest. But my sister, who had 
feared, as I did not, what this visit 
meant, now rushed down the stairs, 
opened the other door of the hall and 
began to alarm the neighbors. See- 
ing that they were likely to be inter- 
rupted in their mission, my five 
callers then folded up their warrant, 
slipped a pair of handcuffs on my 
wrists before I suspected what they 
were doing, and tried to force me 
from the house. 

I was young and strong and re- 
sented this indignity. They had to 
raise me from the floor and lie- an to 
carry me (four of them) to the door 
where my sister stood, raising a con- 
stant alarm. My hands were pow- 



erless, but as they approached the 
door I braced my feet against the 
posts and delayed them. I did the 
same at the posts of the veranda and 
it was some minutes before they got 
me on the gravel walk at the foot of 
my stone steps. Meanwhile, the 
church bells were ringing a fire 
alarm, and the people were gather- 
ing by tens. At the stone posts of 
the gateway I checked their progress 
once more, and again, when the four 
rascals lifted me to insert me, feet 
foremost, in their carriage (a covered 
hack with a driver on the box), I 
braced myself against the sides of 
the carriage door and broke them in. 
By this time it was revealed to them 
that my unfettered feet were making 
all this trouble, and one of the four, 
named Tarleton, wearing a long black 
beard, grasped my feet and brought 
them together, so that I could no 
longer use them in resistance. They 
had got me into their hack as far as 
my knees, when my sister, darting 
forward, grasped the long beard of 
my footman and pulled with so much 
force that the pain of it compelled 
him to lose his grasp, and my feet 
felt the ground again, outside of the 
carriage. 

Now while all this was going on a 
great crowd had collected, among 
them old Colonel Whiting, with his 
daughter Anne, and his stout cane,' 
with which he began to beat the 
horses, while Miss Whiting climbed 
to the box beside the driver, and 
assured him that she was going as far 
as he and his horses went. They 
began to start at the repeated strokes 
of the good colonel's cane, and my 
bearers were left a rod or two behind 
the hack into which they had not 
been able to force me. They saw at 



FRANK B. SANBORN. 



7i 



once that their kidnapping game 
was defeated, but they still held me, 
hatless and in my evening slippers, 
in the street in front of my house. 

At that moment, my counsel, J. S. 
Keyes, appeared by my side, asking 
me if I petitioned for a writ of habeas 
corpus. "By all means," said I, 
and he hurried off to the house of 
Judge Hoar,. some 20 rods away. 

The judge, hearing the tumult, 
and suspecting what it was, went to 
his library and began filling out the 
proper blank for the great writ of 
personal replevin. In less than 10 
minutes after my verbal petition the 
writ, was in the hands of the stalwart 
deputy sheriff, John Moore, who at 
once made the formal demand on my 
captors to surrender their prisoner. 
Stupidly, as they had acted all along, 
they refused. 

The sheriff then called on the 150 
men and women present to act as his 
posse comitatus, which some 20 of the 
men gladly did, and I was forcibly 
snatched from senatorial custody. 
At the same time my Irish neighbors 
rushed upon them and forced them 
to take to their broken carriage, and 
make off towards Lexington, the way 
they had driven up in the early 
evening. They were pursued by 
20 or 30 of my townsmen, some of 
them as far as Lexington; but got 
away with no very serious bruises. 

I was committed to the custody of 
Capt. George L. Prescott (in the 
Civil War, Colonel Prescott, killed at 
Petersburg) and spent the night in 
his house not far from the Old 
Manse, armed, for my better defense, 
with a six-shooter, which Mr. Bull, 
the inventor of the Concord grape 
(then chairman of the selectmen), 
insisted I should take. I slept 



peacefully all the rest of that night, 
from about 11 o'clock, when the fray 
ended. 

In the morning I was taken to 
Boston by Sheriff Moore and carried 
to the old court house, near the pres- 
ent City Hall, where the justices of 
the Supreme Court were holding a 
law term. My counsel, who volun- 
teered for the case, were John A. 
Andrew, soon afterwards governor ; 
Samuel Sewall, a cousin of Mrs. 
Alcott, and my college classmate, 
Robert Treat Paine. The case was 
argued by Andrew and Sewall in my 
behalf, and by C. L. Woodbury, son 
of the distinguished Justice Levi 
Woodbury of New Hampshire, who 
had been dead for some years, but 
whose son was the Democratic dis- 
trict attorney. 

The court room was filled with my 
Concord and Boston friends, among 
them Wendell Phillips and Walt 
Whitman ; and in the afternoon Chief 
Justice Shaw, the most eminent 
jurist in New England, delivered the 
following decision, setting me free: 

OPINION OF THE SUPREME JUDICIAL 
COURT. 

F. B. Sanborn vs. Silas Carleton. 

Shaw, C. J. This arrest was made by Silas 
Carleton, a citizen and inhabitant of Massachu- 
setts ; and in his answer under oath, he shows a 
warrant to Dunning R. McNair, sergeant-at- 
arms of the Senate of the United States, and 
says that the sergeant-at-arms entered an order 
upon it, delegating the power to Carleton to 
make the arrest. There is therefore no conflict 
in this case between the authority of an execu- 
tive officer of the United States and an officer of 
this Commonwealth. 

It appears by the answer of the officer, which 
stands as part of the return to the writ of habeas 
corpus, that Carleton claims to have arrested 
Sanborn under a warrant purporting to have 
been issued under the hand and seal of the vice- 
president of the United States and president of 



FRANK D. SANBORN. 



the Senate. It recites the appointment of a com- 
mittee of the Senate to inquire into the circum- 
stances of the attack made by a body of men 
upon the arsenal of the United States at Har- 
per's Ferry; the citation of Sanborn to answer 
as a witness before such committee ; that he re- 
fused to attend according to such summons ; 
that he was thereby guilty of a contempt; and 
directing Dunning R. McN'air, sergeant-at-arms 
of the Senate, to arrest the said Sanborn, wher- 
ever he could find him. and bring him before the 




Chief Justice Shaw 

//'. M. Hunt. Taken a 

Senate to answer for such contempt. This 
warrant seems to have been issued on the l6th 
of February last. There is an indorsement of 
the same date, by the sergeant-at-arms, author- 
izing and empowering the said <"arleton, the re- 
spondent, to make such arrest ; and the respond- 
ent justifies the arrest made on the jd April, 
instant, under that process. The question is 
whether this arrest is justified by this return. 

This question is a very broad and a very im- 
portant one, and opens many interesting ques- 
tions as to the functions and powers of the 
United States Senate, as a constituent part both 



of the legislative and executive departments of 
the United States government; and the modes 
in which they are to be exercised, and the limits 
by which they are qualified. 

It is admitted in the arguments that there is 
no express provision in the Constitution of the 
United States, giving this authority in terms; 
but it is maintained that it is necessarily inci- 
dental to various authorities vested in the Senate 
of the United States, in its legislative, executive 
and judicial functions, and must therefore be 
held to be conferred by necessary implication. 

These questions manifestly requiring great de- 
liberation and research in order to come to a sat- 
isfactory conclusion, and some preliminary ques- 
tions having been suggested by the petitioner's 
counsel, it was proposed, and not objected to by 
the learned district attorney and assistant district 
attorney of the United States, by whom the 
court were attended in behalf of the respondent, 
to consider these preliminary questions first ; 
because, if the objections, on the face of them, 
were sustained, it would supersede the necessity 
of discussing the other questions arising in the 
case. These points have been argued. 

For obvious reasons, we lay out of this inquiry 
the case of the Senate, when acting in their judi- 
cial capacity, on the trial of an impeachment 
laid before them by the House of Representa- 
tives; and we suppose the same considerations 
would apply to the case of the House of Repre- 
sentatives in summoning witnesses to testify be- 
fore them, as the grand inquest of the United 
States, with a view to an impeachment. 

Then the objections taken to this warrant, as 
apparent on the face of it, as rendering it in- 
sufficient to justify the arrest of the petitioner, 
are three : 

i. That the sergeant-at-arms, in his capacity 
as an officer of the Senate, had no authority 
to execute process out of the limits of the Dis- 
trict of Columbia, over which the United States 
have, by the Constitution, exclusive jurisdiction. 

2. That a sergeant-at-arms is not an officer 
known to the Constitution or laws of the United 
States, as a general executive, of known powers, 
like a sheriff or marshal ; that he is appointed 
and recognized by the rules of the Senate as an 
officer exercising powers regulated by the rules 
and orders of the Senate, and can only exercise 
such powers as are conferred on him by such 
general rules and orders, made with a view to the 
regular proceedings of the Senate; or such as 
may be conferred by the Senate by special 
resolves and acts, as a single department of the 
government, without the concurrence of the 
other members of the government. 



FRANK B. SANBORN. 



73 



3. That by the warrant returned, the power to 
arrest the respondent was in terms limited to 
McNair, the sergeant-at-arms, and could not be 
executed by a deputy. 

In regard to the first, it seems to us that the 
objection assumes a broader ground than it is 
necessary to occupy in deciding this preliminary 
question. We are not prepared to say that in 
no case can the Senate direct process to be 
served beyond the limits of the district, by an 
authority expressly given for that purpose. 

The case of Anderson v. Dunn, 6 Wheat. 204, 
cited in the argument, has little application to 
this question. It is manifest that that was a 
writ of error from the circuit court for the Dis- 
trict of Columbia, and it appears that the alleged 
contempt of Anderson, in offering a bribe to a 
member of the House of Representatives, was 
committed in the District of Columbia, the act 
complained of as the trespass was done therein, 
and the process in question was served therein. 
In that case the process was served by the ser- 
geant-at-arms in person, under an express author- 
ity given by the House of Representatives, by 
their resolve for that purpose, in pursuance of 
which the speaker's warrant was issued. 

The second question appears to us far more 
material. The sergeant-at-arms of the Senate is 
an officer of that house, like their doorkeeper, 
appointed by them, and required by their rules 
and orders to exercise certain powers, mainly 
with a view to order and due course of proceed- 
ing. He is not a general officer, known to the 
law, as a sheriff, having power to appoint gen- 
eral deputies, or to act by special deputation in 
particular cases ; nor like a marshal, who holds 
analogous powers, and possesses similar func- 
tions, under the laws of the United States, to 
those of sheriffs and deputies under the state 
laws. 

But even where it appears, by the terms of the 
reasonable construction of a statute, conferring 
an authority on a sheriff, that it was intended he 
should execute it personally, he cannot exercise 
it by general deputy, and of course he cannot do 
it by special deputation. Wood v. Ross, 11 
Mass. 271. 

But, upon the third point, the court are all of 
opinion that the warrant affords no justification. 
Suppose that the Senate had authority, by the 
resolves passed by them, to cause the petitioner 
to be arrested and brought before them, it ap- 
pears by the warrant issued for that purpose that 
the power was given alone to McNair, sergeant- 
at-arms, and there is nothing to indicate any 
intention on their part to have such arrest 
made by any other person. There is no 



authority, in fact, given by this warrant to dele- 
gate the authority to any other person. It is a 
general rule of the common law, not founded on 
any judicial decision or statute provision, but so 
universally received as to have grown into a 
maxim, that a delegated authority to one does 
not authorize him to delegate it to another. 
Delegata potestas non potest delegari. Broom's 
Maxim's (3d ed.) 755. This grows out of the 
nature of the subject. A special authority is in 
the nature of a trust. It implies confidence in 
the ability, skill or discretion of the party in- 
trusted. The author of such a power may 
extend it if he will, as is done in ordinary pow- 




F. B. Sanborn. 
(1857.) 

ers of attorney, giving power to one or his sub 
stitute or substitutes to do the acts authorized. 
But when it is not so extended it is limited to the 
person named. 

The counsel for the respondent asked what au- 
thority there is for limiting such warrant to the 
person named; it rather belongs to those who 
wish to justify under such delegated power, to 
show judicial authority for the extension. 

On the special ground that this respondent 
had no legal authority to make the arrest, and 
has now no legal authority to detain the petitioner 
in his custody, the order of the court is that the 
said Sanborn be discharged from the custodv 
said Carleton. 



74 



FRANK B. SANBORN. 



I was then taken by my enthusias- 
tic friends to Mast Cambridge in a 
carriage (to avoid rearrest in Boston), 
and from there returned to Concord, 
where a public meeting was held that 
evening to protest against the outrage 
offered to a citizen and to the town. 
No further effort was made to arrest 
me, the time and manner of my seiz- 
ure having put the public opinion of 
Massachusetts wholly on my side. 
Citizens of Boston presented my sis- 
ter with a handsome revolver in rec- 
ognition of her tact and courage. 
The next September I had the satis- 
faction of helping to nominate Mr. 
Andrew for governor of Massachu- 
setts in the Worcester Convention, to 
which I was sent as a Concord dele- 
gate. We elected and reelected him, 
and three years later he appointed 
me secretary of the Board of State 
Charities, a new and important office. 

This year, i860, was the last of 
Judge Shaw's life, and he had no 
opportunity, even had he wished it, 
to modify this decision. It agreed 
with the sentiments of two thirds of 
the people of Massachusetts, and made 
me popular in quarters where I was not 
known before. The Democratic mar- 
shal of New Hampshire, a distant 
cousin of mine, sent me word that, if 
I chose to visit my native state, he 
should not be able to find me, in case 
a second warrant for my arrest should 
issue. But I had no occasion to ac- 
cept his suggestion, being from that 
time forward as safe from arrest as 
the marshals themselves. Indeed, I 
brought suit against the five kidnap- 
pers who visited Concord, and also 
had them indicted at the next term 
of the Middlesex County court for the 
criminal offence of kidnapping, which 
had been carefully defined in our 



laws. But the Civil War coming on, 
early in 1S61, and several of my kid- 
nappers, with their council (General 
B. F. Butler), having volunteered or 
gone to the front, I withdrew my suit, 
and requested the district attorney to 
nolpros. the indictment. 

By this time, June, 1861, there was 
a strong reaction in the ranks of the 
Republican politicians in favor of 
Brown and his cause. At first, in the 
few weeks before the fall elections of 
1859, there was much anxiety and 
trepidation among these leaders. The 
New York Herald and the pro-slavery 
Democratic committees charged Sew- 
ard, Greeley, Giddings and other Re- 
publicans of prominence with having 
known and approved Brown's plans 
in advance, and the Herald in Octo- 
ber, 1859, went so far as to say: 

We have ascertained one curious fact which 
must not be overlooked. The outbreak was ex- 
pected to have taken place several months ago ; 
and in that expectation W. H. Seward went to 
Europe and Horace Greeley expected to have 
done so, but afterwards changed his destination 
to the Pacific coast. After Brown and his un- 
fortunate comrades shall have been disposed of, 
the turn of Seward and the other Republican 
senators and members of congress will come. 
If they be not impeached and condemned, then 
neither should a hair of John brown's head suf- 
fer, for he is really less guilty than they. 

Charles Sumner was also in Eu- 
rope when Brown's attack was made, 
but his movements and those of Sew- 
ard had nothing to do with Brown's 
foray. Henry Wilson, however, Sum- 
ner's colleague in the Senate, a very 
impressible statesman, who needed 
the steadying touch of Sumner to 
hold him to his task, was much con- 
cerned at these attacks, which did 
not spare him. At a campaign rally 
in New York City, just before the 
election of 1S59, he undertook to re- 



FRANK B. SANBORN. 



75 



ply to the Herald and other pro-sla- 
very slanderers thus: 

At present, after other states have spoken, 
New Jersey, Wisconsin and Massachusetts — 
and spoken gloriously —an effort is being made, 
a poor, miserable, abortive, futile effort, to 
assail the cause of Republican liberty in New 
York by charging the responsibility of an insane 



ing to the slave oligarchy which 
Brown had given them, as he lay 
wounded on the armory floor at Har- 
per's Ferry, supposed to be dying. 
Mr. Cleveland said : 

The Southern party— they are not a Demo- 
cratic party— want to govern the whole Union 




old man's act at Harper's Ferry upon the 275,- 
000 liberty-loving, patriotic Union-saving men of 
this state. 

He was going on to deprecate this, 
and to charge the pro- slavery Demo- 
crats with being really responsible 
for the anti-slavery agitation, when 
an attack of vertigo cut his speech 
short. Governor Cleveland of Con- 
necticut then took up the same 
thought, and exaggerated the warn- 



and every state in it, and to extend slavery all 
over it. I pray them, and every man should 
pray them, to desist from their insane policy. 
We advise them to concert with their Northern 
brethren some plan for the full emancipation of 
their slaves, and not continue to strive for the 
reopening of the Africa slave-trade. With such 
new slaves, who would be imported by thou- 
sands, they want to take the free soil of our 
land and give it over to African cultivators. 
When that has been long going on, we do not 
want, hereafter, to see some other John Brown 
breaking up this entire Union, and scattering 
woe and desolation North as well as South. 



7 6 



FRANK D. SANBORN. 



This was a more reasonable alter- 
native than most men in that excited 
time contemplated ; but there was 
great exaggeration in it. What 
Brown contemplated was such a dem- 
onstration as would compel North 
and South to face the real issue of 
slavery's existence in a democracy, 
and settle the question once for all. 
His active efforts to retaliate on Mis- 
souri, meant the same thing ; the Mis- 
souri plan and the Virginia plan were 
at heart the same, their object being 
to make slaveholding unsafe, and to 
give the slave a chance to fight for 
his freedom under rigid discipline, 
and not in the wild tumult of an in- 
surrection. This very policy of 
Brown's was adopted in 1861 by Gen- 
eral Fremont, in 1862 by Abraham 
Lincoln, and in i863-'6.| by Secretary 
Stanton, after pressure from Governor 
Andrew and other earnest men in all 
parts of the North. It was this that 
finally overcame the Rebellion, and 
put an end to the long Civil War. 
John Brown led the way in this pol- 
icy, and the great heart of the people, 
wiser in its impulses than the states- 
men in their councils, early responded 
to the appeal that Brown had made. 
Nothing else made the name and fate 
of Brown the watchword and rallying 
song of our armies. Hardly had the 
Civil War begun in good earnest, 
when a regiment of Massachusetts 
soldiers, with a son of Daniel Web- 
ster at their head, came marching up 
State Street (where, ten years before, 
fugitive slaves were dragged back to 
slavery under Webster's Fugitive 
Slave Bill), singing, for the first time 
in the presence of an audience, the 
famous "John Brown Song ; " and it 
was soon heard from the lips of 
myriads wherever the Union armies 



were encamped or marching. Its 
sentiment inspired the North and en- 
couraged Lincoln to abolish slavery 
by proclamation, but little more than 
three years after Brown's death at 
Charlestown. 

I visited the scene of his imprison- 
ment and execution, in the spring of 
1875, and met his honorable jailer, 
John Avis, whose later portrait is 
here given. He had been a captain 
in the Confederate army under Lee, 
and had ceased to be prison-keeper ; 
but was the same composed, friendly 
man that Brown had found him, in 
the six weeks he lived in that prison. 
So much was Brown affected by his 
kindness that when a rescue was pro- 




John Avis. 
' o/yohn Brown. Takiu about 1SS0. 

posed to him by friends at the North, 
he refused to consider it ; saying that 
it would not be fair to Captain Avis 
to attempt aught of the kind. 

Not until 1882 did I visit Kansas 
and examine the scene of Brown's 



FRANK B. SANBORN. 



77 



deeds there. I found his name asso- 
ciated in the popular tradition with 
many acts he could hardly have per- 
formed, — a sure sign that tradition 
and myth were doing their work, as 
always after a hero has appeared. I 
lingered longest around Osawatomie, 
near which prairie town Brown and 
his sons had dwelt on their farms, and 
where the first of his sons was killed 
in the conflict which cost his own 
life and that of three of his children. 
A mile or so northwest of the village 
was the log-cabin of Rev. S. L. 
Adair, who had married a half sister 
of Brown, and had built the cabin be- 
fore the Kansas troubles began. No 
one spot in Kansas was more often 
visited by the hero than this ; and 
his sons, John, Owen, Jason and 
Salmon, were also often there. The 
funeral of his son Frederick was held 
in the great living room of this cabin, 
— his mangled body having been 
brought in there from the high 
prairie farther west, where he was 
shot by the invading Missourians. 
I took tea with Mr. Adair and his 
daughters, and inquired particularly 
about the flourishing white pine tree 
that was seen near the cabin. Mr. 
Adair told me that when he last 
visited his native New York, in the 
pine-growing region, he had taken 
up two young pines and brought 
them to shade a part of his dooryard, 
— and these large trees were the re- 
sult. They seemed to flourish as 
well in the rich limestone soil of the 
high prairie as in the rocky hills of 
northern New York. 

Among the many who congratu- 
lated me on my successful resistance 
to the arrogance of the pro-slavery 
majority in the senate, was my col- 
lege classmate, Francis Channing 



Barlow, with whom I had kept up a 
correspondence since we graduated in 
1855, — he in New York City, prac- 
tising law, and I in Concord, teach- 
ing Greek and Latin, which we had 
read together in Cambridge. Re- 




Gen. F. C. Barlow. 

cently I have acquired, through the 
kindness of another classmate, Gen. 
S. C. Lawrence of Medford, a rare 
portrait of General Barlow; in his 
uniform, as he fought and was 
wounded at Gettysburg. It may 
fitl5 T adorn this warlike chapter. 

" I shall not be forward to think 
him mistaken in his method," said 
Thoreau, " who quickest succeeds to 
liberate the slave." Can any method 
be found that could have done that 
work quicker than Brown's ? Within 
.six years from his execution there 
was not a slave held in bondage in 
the United States ; but for Brown's 
career it might have been sixty years 
before we reached that result. His 
attack and its consequences showed 



78 



FRANK B. SANBORN. 



both North ami South the gulf on 
whose brink they were standing : 
the infuriated slave-masters made 
haste to break up the Union, which 
they saw might ultimately destroy 
their system. Put thus to the test, 
our millions of the North were not 
slow to say, " We choose union 
without slavery, even at the cost of 
indefinite bloodshed, to any further 
union with slave-masters and trai- 
tors." The mobs of our cities, 
which, in January, [86i, were howl-' 
ing against the abolitionists, six 
months later were dangerous to com- 
promisers that counseled peace with 
dishonor. The ancient belief that in 
battle that army must win in whose 
vanguard the first victim devoted 
himself to death, was once more jus- 
tified. Led on by a foreordination 
he felt but did not understand. Brown 
gave his life for the cause destined to 
succeed. Unlike that French mar- 
shal who " spent a long life carrying 
aid to the stronger side," Brown lent 
his good sword to that which seemed 
the weaker, but which had God for 
its reserve. 



Standing on the battlefield of Get- 
tysburg less than four years after 
Brown's public murder (November 
19, 1863), Lincoln pronounced the 
funeral oration, more eloquent than 
Pericles, of those who "gave their 
lives that the nation might live." 
Not many months later Lincoln him- 
self fell, — the last great victim in the 
cause of which Brown was the first 
great martyr. But the brave men 
commemorated at Gettysburg went 
forth to battle at the call of a grand 
people ; they were sustained by the 
resources and the ardor of millions. 
I must still recall the sacrifice of my 
old friend, — lonely, poor, persecuted, 
making a stand on the outpost of 
Freedom, — our own guns trained 
upon him, as the furious enemy 
swept him to death in the storm of 
their vengeance ; and now I see that 
History cannot forget him, but exalts 
him among the liberators of mankind, 
who sealed the testament of their ben- 
efactions with the blood of noble 
hearts. 

Pitied by gentle hearts Kilmarnock died ; 
The brave, Balmerino! were on thy side. 



NEW HAMPSHIRE BIOGRAPHY 
and AUTOBIOGRAPHY 



BY 



F. B. SANBORN 



OF 



CONCORD IN MASSACHUSETTS 



(183 1 to 1860) 



PRIVATELY PRINTED 

CONCORD, NEW HAMPSHIRE 

JULY, 1905 






*N=- 



Agl2 



